Without A Conscience

ELIZABETH FRALEY

Written, Illustrated and Edited by Elizabeth Fraley

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Dedicated to all of the victims and their families.

All Rights Reserved Graphic Design by Audrey Chandler

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 1) What Does It All Mean?

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-Defining These Murderers -Psychopath Vs. Psychotic -Degrees of Murder (U.S.)

2) Who Are They?

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-General Traits -Warning Signs -Men Vs. Women Serial Killers

3) What Is The History? Page 17 -Old As Sin

4) Who Are The Infamous Serial Killers?

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-Lydia Sherman -H.H. Holmes -Albert Fish -Earle Leonard Nelson -Edward Gein -Harvey Murray Glatman -John Wayne Gacy -Gary Heidnik -Jeffrey Dahmer -Theodore Bundy -Gary Ridgway -Richard Chase

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-Edmund Kemper -Fritz Haarmann -Robert Berdella -Andrei Chikatilo

5) What Are The Different Classifications? Page 109 -Perversions Sadism Dominance Fetishism Transvestism Vampirism Cannibalism Necrophilia Pedophila Gerontophilia

6) Why Do They Do It? Page 115 -Avatism -Brain Damage -Child Abuse -Mother Hatred -Mean Genes -Adoption -Fantasy -Profit -Celebrity -The Devil Made Me Do It

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7) How Do They Do It?

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-Triggers -Hunting Grounds -Targets of Opportunity -Snare -Wanted Ads -Signature, Ritual, M.O. -Methods Rippers Stranglers Ax Murderers Poisoners Shooters -Taunts -Escalation -Torture -Trophies -Disposal

8) How Does It End?

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-Profiling -Capture -Suicide -Punishment -Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity -Unsolved

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WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? Chapter One

Defining These Murderers A serial killer is defined as a person killing two or more people with a cooling off period in between murders, which could be as little as a few hours or as long as twenty years.

Some people have a hard time differentiating between serial killers, mass murderers and spree killers. The difference is that mass murderer occurs in a single location, usually with firearms. Filled with anger at society, one day the murderer makes a move. Being suicidal, their goal is to take as many people with them. Spree killers commit their murders in multiple places, targeting specific people, but will kill anyone that stands in the way.

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Psychopath vs. Psychotic A psychopath, knowing the difference between wrong and right, is not legally insane. Although, it can be argued that they are morally insane. They are rational, often intelligent people who --theoretically-- wear a mask to conceal their disturbing personality. Lacking of empathy, guilt, and remorse and incapable of love, caring, and sorrow for others (discluding themselves, of course).

Psychotics, on the other hand, have a severe mental disorder. They suffer from hallucinations, delusions, hearing voices, seeing visions, and being possessed by bizarre beliefs. They have completely lost touch reality. The main form of psychosis being schizophrenia and paranoia.

Degrees of Murder (U.S.) First degree murder is any murder that is willful and premeditated. Felony murder is typically first degree. A felony murder is an unplanned murder that occurs during the commission of a felony; for example, a defendant burglarizes a house and during the burglary, kills the homeowner. A federal offense of first-degree murder requires a mandatory sentencing of death or life imprisonment.

Second degree murder is a murder that is not premeditated or planned in advance. Second-degree murder by an inmate, even escaped, serving a life sentence, requires a mandatory sentencing of life imprisonment. Second-degree murder

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requires a mandatory sentencing of imprisonment for life or any term.

Voluntary manslaughter sometimes called a “Heat of Passion” murder, is any intentional killing that involved no prior intent to kill, and which was committed under such circumstances that would “cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed.” Both this and seconddegree murder are committed on the spot, but the two differ in the magnitude of the circumstances surrounding the crime.

For an example, a bar fight that results in death would ordinarily constitute second-degree murder. If that same bar fight stemmed from a discovery of infidelity, however, it may be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter.

Involuntary manslaughter stems from a lack of intention to cause death but involving an intentional, or negligent, act leading to death. A drunk driving-related death is typically involuntary manslaughter. The “unintentional” element refers to the lack of intent to bring about the death. Involuntary manslaughter is “unintentional”, because the killer did not intend for a death to result from their intentional actions. If there is a presence of intention it relates only to the intent to cause a violent act, which brings about the death, but not an intention to bring about the death itself.

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WHO ARE THEY? Chapter Two

General Traits -Mostly single, white males -Tend to be intelligent with a mean IQ of “bright normal�

-Despite intelligence, they do poorly in school and have spotty employment records -Came from deeply troubled families, typically abandoned at an early age by their fathers and grew up in broken homes dominated by their mothers -Long history of psychiatric problems, criminal behavior, and alcoholism in their family -In childhood, suffered significant abuse -- ranging from psychological, physical and sexual. Such brutal mistreatment instills them with profound feelings of humiliation and helplessness

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-Because of their resentment towards their distant, absent, or abusive fathers, they have a great deal of trouble with male authority figures. Because of being dominated by their mothers, they have a powerful hostility towards all women -Manifest psychiatric problems at an early age, spending time in institutions as children -From extreme social isolation and a general hatred of the world, everyone, and themselves, they become suicidal as teenagers -They display precocious and abiding interest in deviant sexuality and are obsessed with fetishism, voyeurism, and violent pornography

Warning Signs There are three main psychopathological red flags in serial killers growing up...

Enuresis, which is a fancy word for bedwetting. Of course there is nothing unusual about bedwetting as a child until the problem persists into puberty.

Pyromania, another fancy word for fire-starting. This fuels the fire (pun-intended) of a young child’s lust for destruction.

Precocious Sadism, the final fancy word, which usually refers to animal torture. The torture and killing of animals to derive pleasure is said to be a “gate-way�, slowly moving from small animals to larger animals and. finally, to human beings.

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MEN VS. WOMEN Serial Killers The main difference with men and women serial killers is the way that their murders are executed. Masculine traits of murder include rape, mutilation, dismemberment, violating of bodies, lurid and violent. Feminine traits of murder include grotesque, sadistic travesty of intimacy and love -- mainly by poisoning and smothering.

There are two main types of women serial killers, “Angels of Death” and “Black Widows”.

“Angels of Death” are homicidal healthcare workers. Nurses who kill perceive how to exploit the atmosphere of trust in the healthcare community and how to hasten deaths that may go unnoticed in an already vulnerable area. Some enter the healthcare profession as “angels of death”, while others transform into killers on the job. Often, these killers have been allowed to drift from one hospital to another, fired under a cloud of suspicion but rarely brought to justice until after incriminating evidence has reached shocking levels. “many experts speculate that healthcare has contributed more serial killers than all other professions combined and that the field attracts a disproportionately high number of people with a pathological interest in life and death.” -Kelly Pyrek.

“Black Widows” are typically intelligent, manipulative, organized and patient. They commit several murders over a long period of time and their victims include anyone who interferes with their happiness -- husbands, childrens, inlaws, acquaintances, etc. The black widow serial killer

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typically begins her criminal career after the age of twenty five and actively murders victims for a decade or more before she is caught. Nicknamed after the black widow spider, who consumers her mate after conceiving. The goal is simple; get as rich as possible off the people around and get rid of anyone who stands in the way.

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WHAT IS THE HISTORY? Chapter Three

Old As Sin Serial killers have been a rather disturbing aspect of human society throughout history, in all corners of the world.

Evidence suggests that a predilection for savage cruelty is encoded in our DNA, an evolutionary inheritance from our earliest primate ancestors.

Ancient Greek myths - those of butchering and cannibalism to recorded deeds of medieval knights, including pillage, rape, and mass slaughter - suggest that human beings have always indulged in gruesome barbaric behavior.

For example, even in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a young woman is gang-raped, has her tongue cut out and her hands chopped off to prevent her from identifying her assailants.

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Back in the olden days, unfortunately, anyone could get away with serial murder, as long as their victims were those who “didn’t matter” in society (including peasants, Native Americans, and other despised or disenfranchised members of society).

“Record keeping was highly unreliable in times past and crime detection was very rudimentary (the authorities would have had great difficulty in identifying a serial killer’s work), and so the true incidence of serial murder in pre-modern times is unknown.” -David Lester, Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion.

15th Century: Vlad the Impaler -- A member of the House of Draculesti, a branch of the House of Basarab, known by his patronymic name: Dracula. He was three-time Voivode of Wallachia, ruling mainly from 1456 to 1462. His father, Vlad II Dracul, was a member of the Order of the Dragon. Vlad III spent much of his rule campaigning against the Ottoman Empire and its expansion. As a cognomen ‘The Impaler’ suggests, his practice of impaling his enemies is the central to his historical reputation. During his lifetime, his reputation for excessive cruelty spread abroad, to Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The total number of his victims is estimated in the tens of thousands.

Gilles de Rais -- A Breton knight, a leader in the French army and a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. He is best

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known by his reputation and conviction as a prolific serial killer of children. After 1432, Gilles engaged in a series of child murders, his victims possibly numbering in the hundreds. The killings came to an end in 1440, when a violent dispute with a clergyman led to an ecclesiastical investigation, which brought Gilles’ crimes to light. Gilles was condemned to death and hanged at Nantes in October of 1440.

16th Century: Erzsebet “Blood Countess” Bathory -- The countess from the renowned Bathory family of nobility in the Kingdom of Hungary. She has been labeled the most prolific female serial in history, although the number of her murders is debated, and is remembered as the “Blood Countess.” After her husband’s death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls, with one witness attributing them to over 660 victims, though the number for which they were convicted was 80. Erzsebet herself was neither trialed nor convicted. Later writings about the case have led to legendary accounts of the Countess bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth.

Peter Stubbe -- was a Rhenish farmer, accused of being a serial killer and a cannibal, was also known as the “Werewolf of Bedburg.” During 1589, Stubbe had one of the most lurid and famous werewolf trials of history. After being stretched on a rack, and before further torture commenced, he confessed to having practiced black magic since he was

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twelve years old. He claimed that the Devil had given him a magical belt, enabling him to metamorphose into “the likeness of a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparked like fire, a mouth great and wide, and most sharp and cruel teeth, a huge body, and mighty paws.” Removing the belt, he said, made him transform back to his human form. For twenty-five years, Stubbe had allegedly been an “insatiable bloodsucker” who gorged on the flesh of goats, lambs, and sheep, as well as men, women, and children. He confessed to killing and eating fourteen children, two pregnant women, and their fetuses. One of the fourteen children was his own son, whose brain he devoured.

17th Century: “The Bloody Innkeeper” -- The discovery of seven bodies, one with a rusty knife embedded in its skull, in the backyard of an alehouse at Pultoe, near Gloucester. The property had previously been owned by an old Cromwellian soldier and his Scottish wife, but they sold the house to a blacksmith, seeking larger living quarters. As the new owner was digging a foundation for the smithy he would going to build, he discovered the buried corpses.

Thomas Sherwood and Elizabeth Evans -- Known as “Country Tom” and “Canterbury Bess”, were London murderers. Bess would locate a tipsy man in a public place and then entice him to a remote location where her partner would rob and murder him. At least five men were butchered

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by Tom and Bess. They were caught, however, and executed in 1635.

18th Century: Sweeney Todd -- The demon barber, Sweeney Todd, is the English boogeyman. Todd used a trap door and trick chair to slaughter his clients. He preyed upon very common human fears: being attacked while vulnerable, and being served up as food or unknowingly consuming someone else. He was a mad barber, and most did end up as filling for meat pies.

“La Tofania” -- An infamous lately from Palermo, who made good business for over fifty years selling her large production of Aqua Tofana: a strong poison. The product was sold to lady clients, widows-to-be, accompanied by instructions for its use. Over 600 victims are known to have died from this poison, mostly husbands and unhappy spouses.

19th Century: “Jack the Ripper” -- Is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. Attacks ascribed to the Ripper typically involved female prostitutes from the slums whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. The removal of internal organs from at least three of the victims led to proposals that their killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge.

“Bloody Benders” -- An alleged family of serial killers who

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owned an inn and small general store in Labette county of southeastern Kansas from 1871 to 1873. The family consisted of John Bender, his wife Kate Bender, son John Jr., and daughter Kate.

20th Century: Aileen Wuornos -- A Florida-based biller and prostitute who murdered seven men in 1989-1990. She killed her first victim in November of 1989, in what she would later claim was selfdefense. She killed several more men, and was eventually caught after getting in a minor accident while driving one of her victim’s cars. She was executed in 2002.

“The Zodiac” -- A serial killer who operated in Northern California, whose identification remains unknown. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. The killer originated the name “Zodiac” in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press.

21st Century: Steve “The Suffolk Ripper” Wright -- An English serial killer who is currently serving life imprisonment for the murder of five women who worked as prostitutes in Ipswich, Suffolk.

Beltway Snipers -- Ten people were killed and three other victims were critically injured in several locations throughout the Washington Metropolitan Area and along Interstate 95 in Virginia. It wa widely speculated that a single sniper, initially identified as a white man with assumed military experience, was using the Capital Beltway for travel, possibly in a white

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van or truck. The killings were found to be perpetrated by one man, John Allen Muhammad, and one minor, Lee Boyd Malvo.

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WHO ARE THE FAMOUS SERIAL KILLERS? Chapter Four

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Lydia Sherman “Poison Fiend”, “Borgia of Connecticut”, “Queen Poisoner” 1825-1879 Birthplace: New Brunswick, New Jersey Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Female Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: Mid 19th Century Method(s): Poison Perversion(s): Sadism Number of Victims: 11 Type of Victims: Her Husbands and Children Hunting Grounds: Burlington, New Jersey Occupation at Large: Unemployed Family Status at Large: Married, 13 Children Lydia Sherman (her maiden name being Danbury) was seventeen years old when she married her first husband, Edward Struck, a forty-year-old widower with six children from his previous marriage. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl within a year of their marriage. She then gave birth to six more babies, in rapid succession. Struck, with a wife and thirteen children to support, became a police officer. After an incident of not responding quickly enough during a police call, however, he was fired.

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By then, Struck’s children from his first marriage had grown up and left home, and, due to an intestinal ailment, one of Lydia’s babies passed away. Struck, unable to support and feed his family, plunged into a deep depression.

Refusing to leave his bed, Lydia found him worthless and killed him with arsenic-laced porridge. The physician diagnosed the cause of death as “consumption” and Lydia got away with her first murder.

Lydia, now a forty-two-year-old widow with no income, poisoned her three youngest children with arsenic. Now, only supporting three children and getting help from her fourteenyear-old son, George, who received a job as a painter’s assistant, Lydia’s situation greatly improved. Just as things were improving, however, George developed a condition known as “painter’s colic” and was forced to quit work. After a week, George had still not recuperated and, showing no signs of improvement to Lydia, she killed him with arsenicspiked tea.

Now, only two of Lydia’s children were still living: her eighteen-year-old daughter, also named Lydia, and her twelve-year-old daughter, named Ann Eliza. Ann Eliza, being a frail child, was constantly sick with fever and chills. Lydia, feeling burdened by taking care of her, killed the little girl by mixing a few grains of arsenic into a spoonful of patent medicine. The cause of death was given as “typhoid fever”.

Now it was just down to the two Lydia’s living together -mother and daughter -- living together in a small apartment.

One afternoon, young Lydia returned home with a fever and

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took to bed. Again, not wanting to care for her daughter, gave her the same arsenic-laced medicine as she had gave Ann Eliza.

Shortly afterward, Lydia moved to Stratford, Connecticut, where she married an old man named Dennis Hurlburt, a local farmer of considerable means. A little over a year into their marriage, Hurlburt fell violently ill and died after eating a bowl of his wife’s homemade clam chowder. His death was attributed to “cholera”.

The forty-six-year old widow came into a considerable inheritance. If her motives had been entirely mercenary, she could have never killed again and been more than well off.

Lydia was addicted to cruelty and death, profit was just icing on the cake.

Within months of her last husband’s death, Lydia married Horatio N. Sherman, an alcoholic widower with four children.

Just two months after their wedding, Lydia murdered Sherman’s youngest child, a four-month-old baby named Frankie. The month following, she poisoned his fourteenyear-old daughter, Ada. The sudden death of two of his children devastated Sherman and he began drinking even harder than he had before. After returning from one week long bender, he stayed in bed for several days before returning to work the upcoming Monday. When he came home from work that Monday evening, Lydia was waiting with a nice, sweet cup of poisoned hot chocolate. Two days after, he was dead.

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Dr. Beardsley, Sherman’s physician, was suspicious of the sudden, shocking death of his seemingly healthy patient.

Obtaining permission to conduct a postmortem, Beardsley removed the stomach and liver and shipped them to a toxicology professor at Yale for analysis. Three weeks later, he received the results. Sherman’s liver was found to be saturated with arsenic and a warrant was promptly issued for the arrest of Lydia Sherman.

On June 7th, 1871, she was charged with the murder of Horatio Sherman. Her trial was a nationwide sensation and in the end, Lydia was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the state prison at Wethersfield, where she died of cancer in 1879.

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H.H. Holmes “Dr. Death’, “The Torture Doctor”, “The Arch Fiend” 1860-1896 Birthplace: Gilmanton, New Hampshire Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1983-1994 Method(s): Torture, Suffocation, Gas Poisoning Perversion(s): Sadism Number of Victims: 27-50 Type of Victims: No Preference Hunting Grounds: Chicago Occupation at Large: Pharmacy Proprietor Family Status at Large: No Wife, No Children “I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing.”

Born in 1860, Herman was a delicately built boy, blueeyed and brown-haired, with a reputation as being “the brightest lad in town.” Another known fact among his classmates was that he was slightly odd. His father devoutly believed in the Bible and, to show his devotion to his son, beat Herman with savage regularity.

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Herman was a hermit throughout his childhood, shunning other children and keeping to himself. He had one friend, a slightly older boy with the name Tom. Tom plunged to his death from the upstairs landing of a deserted house while he was exploring with Herman. Herman clearly saw his friend’s death, standing at arm’s length behind Tom at the time.

Herman was often a victim to the village bullies, partly from of his delicate stature and partly from his peculiar personality. One morning, two of Herman’s older classmates waited until the village doctor was away from his office and out on a house call, then waylaid Herman. Dragging him inside, they wrestled Herman over to the human skeleton mounted on a metal stand in the corner of the office. They forced the bony skeleton figures against the hysterical boy’s face, and then left him shrieking on the floor.

This traumatic experience was the introduction to Herman’s lifelong interest in anatomy. He was already conducting secret medical experiences -- first on frogs and salamanders, then on rabbits, kittens, and stray dogs -- by the time that he was eleven.

After a year of college in Vermont, Herman transferred to the University of Michigan and graduated with a medical degree in 1884. By then, Herman was an accomplished con artist who had learned how to bilk insurance companies of thousands of dollars. He would simply take out a life insurance policy for a fictitious person, acquire a corpse, claim that corpse was the insured individual, and cash in the policy. Of course, the greatest step in his plan is acquiring

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the corpses, which he had already become quite proficient with.

In 1886, Herman had shown up in Chicago and assumed the pseudonym by which the whole world would at some point know him: Doctor Henry Howard Holmes.

Within a few months, Dr. Holmes had taken a job as a druggist’s assistant in the suburb of Englewood. The drugstore was owned by Holton, an elderly widow. Before the end of the year, Holton had mysteriously disappeared.

When asked by inquiring customers, the handsome young assistant told them that she had “gone to California to visit relatives”. By that time, he was no longer an assistant. The city directory listed a new proprietor of the pharmacy in Englewood: Dr. H. H. Holmes.

From the profits of his store, combined with the proceeds from assorted scams, Holmes constructed a magnificent new residence for himself on a vacant lot across the street from his drugstore. The house was strikingly similar to the owner: the exterior showed of nothing but affluence and good taste, but behind the handsome facade it showed to the world, inside the labyrinthine realm laid madness and horror.

Holmes named this new building, “the Castle”. It contained a prodigious amount of rooms, over one hundred, linked by secret passages, fake walls, concealed shafts, and trapdoors. Some rooms were soundproofed and padded asbestos; peepholes in the doors allowing for Holmes to look into them. Many were equipped with gas pipes connected to

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a large tank in the cellar. He could fill any of the chambers with poisonous gas by the simple click of a button from the control panel in his office. Chutes ran from the second and third floors of the buildings to the basement, where Holmes kept a laboratory, full with a dissection table, surgical instruments, and an oven large enough to fit an entire human body.

A short time after moving into the Castle, Holmes kindly invited a watchmaker named Conner -- whose family consisted of his wife, Julia, and a lovely small girl named Pearl -- to set up shop in a corner of the pharmacy. Before long, he had more than befriended Julia, and she became his mistress. After she became pregnant by Holmes, Mr. Conner rightfully packed up his belongings and left for good.

Holmes, not prepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood, performed a crude abortion on Julia, killing her in the process, then dispatching little Pearl with chloroform.

When the Chicago World’s Fair opened in 1893, lodgings were hard to find within the city. Holmes began renting rooms to the tourists, where few were ever seen alive again.

Throughout this period, local medical schools received a consistent supply of human skeletons from Dr. Holmes, and since the schools were in desperate need, they asked no questions.

Holmes was finally arrested after killing Ben Pitezel, his confederate. He used Pitezel’s corpse to pull off his insurance fraud, but was caught by a couple clever investigators. The discovery of the terrors inside his “Murder

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Castle� sent shock waves throughout the country. His trial became the century’s greatest criminal sensation. Following his conviction, he confessed to twenty-seven murders, though authorities were near convinced it was closer to fifty.

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Albert Fish “Gray Man”, “Werewolf of Wysteria”, “Brooklyn Vampire”, “The Boogey Man” 1870-1936 Birthplace: Washington, D.C. Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Time at Large: 1919-1934 Method(s): Rape, Stabbing, Strangling Perversion(s): Sadism, Dominance, Fetishism, Vampirism, Cannibalism, Pedophilia Number of Victims: 4-100 Type of Victims: Children Hunting Grounds: New York Occupation at Large: House Painter, Handyman Family Status at Large: No Wife, 6 Children “I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost.”

Edward Budd, an able-bodied, energetic young man and the eldest child of a poor, working-class family just making it by in a New York City tenement, was hoping to find a summer work as a farm hand. In hopes of getting a job, he placed a classified ad in a newspaper: “Youth, 18, wishes position in country.”

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Days later, a weak-looking old man with gentle eyes and a drooping mustache made an appearance at the Budds’ apartment. Introducing himself with the name Frank Howard, explaining that he was hiring help for his truck farm on Long Island. He came across Edward’s ad in the paper and came to interview the young man for the job.

Mr. Howard seemed satisfied with the interview and made a generous offer, arranging to return in a few days to pick Edward up and drive him to the farm.

After those few days, the old man returned. Edward was out on an errand and Mrs. Budd invited her son’s employer to have lunch with the family while they awaited Edward’s return.

Shortly later, while Mr. Howard sat at the Budd’s kitchen table, the youngest member of the family -- a beautiful little girl named Grace -- entered the room. She instantly caught the old man’s eye and he called her to come over and sit on his knee, exclaiming over her beauty. As he caressed her smooth brown hair, he was reminded of his ten-year-old granddaughter.

Abruptly turning to her parents, he informed them of a birthday party his niece was having that afternoon. He would attend the party for a few hours then pick up Edward afterwards. He asked if, perhaps, Grace would like to come along with him. It was going to be quite a party -- with lots of children, games, and ice cream. He would take good care of her and bring her home before dark.

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As most mothers, Mrs. Budd felt a little uncomfortable leaving her children in the possession of a virtual stranger.

Still, Mr. Howard seemed so kind and utterly harmless that her worries seemed foolish. And besides, the old gentleman had offered her son a job he desperately needed.

“Let her go,” Graces father urged, “she doesn’t see much good times.” Mrs. Budd was persuaded and helped her daughter pick out the prettiest outfit. Then, the man known as Frank howard -- whose name was really Albert Fish and whose kindly demeanor concealed a mind of unimaginable depravity -- took the child by the hand and led her away from home toward a subway station. Before boarding the train, Fish stopped to retrieve a canvas bundle he had stashed behind a corner newsstand. Inside the bundle was a butcher’s knife, a cleaver, and a saw.

Albert Fish came from a branch of the family characterized by poverty and psychosis. When he was at the young age of five, his parents placed him in a public orphanage, unable to afford his upbringing. There, Fish had a teacher whose discipline was to strip her young charges naked and beat their bare bodies while the other little boys and girls watched with fear. Fish came away from this experience with a singular education, to “enjoy everything that hurt.”

At twenty-eight-years-old, Fish made a living as a house painter and handyman. He married a nineteen-year-old woman who would eventually leave him for another man, leaving Fish to care for their six children. He was an

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affectionate father and grandfather, but at the same time, admitted to other feelings toward children. As he grew older and older, he became increasingly possessed by what he described as a “lust for their blood.”

Being obsessed throughout his life with religion, Fish began to have searing visions of Christ and His angels and to hear the “voice” of God addressing him in the darkness.

His compulsion to kill grew overpowering.

Even to this day, no one knows the precise number of Fish’s victims, though it seems certain that he molested several hundred and slew at least fifteen. Most were children of the slums, many of his victims were black, and authorities -- after a rigorous investigation -- simply discontinued the search. Eventually, authorities would learn the horrifying and gruesome details from Albert Fish himself.

But that wouldn’t happen until a long six years after Grace Budd’s disappearance. Grace Budd’s parents had no way of knowing any of these facts about the old man who called himself Frank Howard -- the friendly man who led their little daughter onto the New York Central Railroad, while, tucked under one arm, he carried the canvas bundle containing multiple murder weapons.

Over the next six years, the New York City police conducted a massive manhunt for the Budd girl and her kidnapper. All hope was almost lost until a letter addressed to Grace’s mother arrived at the Budds’ apartment. Its contents were sickly demented. The anonymous writer began by recalling a story he had heard about “a famine in

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China,” during which both boys and girls under the age of twelve were seized and cut up, with their meat being sold.

The writer explained that he had been told this store by a sea captain who had lived in Hong Kong. “On Sunday June the 3 1928,” the letter continued, “I called on you at 406 W. 15 St. . . . We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me.

I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. . . . I took her to an empty house in Westchester. . . . I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take her meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it.

How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven.”

Detecting King, the leader of the manhunt, was able to trace the letter to its source. Fish was arrested and his confession stunned even the most hardened officers.

Rish revealed that Grace was not his intended victim when he first showed up at the Budd’s household. He had originally planned to kill her brother by luring Edward up to an abandoned house in suburban Westchester, overpower him, bind him with stout cords, and slice of his penis.

Afterward, he had the plan to take the train back to the city and leave the trussed and mutilated boy to bleed to death on the floor of the cottage.

But the moment he saw pretty little Grace, however, he changed his plans. It was her that he wanted now, not her brother. Which is the reason to why he made up the birthday party story on the spot. Then, once out of the city, he took her to a place known locally as Wisteria Cottage. He left her out in the empty house’s front yard to pick wildflowers and

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then made his way to an upstairs bedroom and stripped completely naked. Concealing himself behind a door, he called for Grace to come upstairs. When she reached the landing, he leapt out from behind the door and strangled her, kneeling on her chest and climaxing twice as she expired.

Right after, he cut her body into pieces and disposed of them in various places around the property. Expect for a few pounds of her flesh that he kept, wrapped in newspaper.

Fish’s trial in 1935 held the nation riveted with its steady stream of shocking revelations -- including the human stew made from the little girl’s body, cooking her flesh in a pot with onion, carrots, and strips of bacon, devouring the stew over a period of about a week.

Meanwhile, Fish took a predilection to Dr. Fredric Wertham, senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, to who had been retained by the defense to examine the madman.

For the first time, Fish spoke the revealing and incredible story of his life and the crimes he’s committed -- a history so shocking that, years later, Wertham continues to regard Fish as the most crazily deranged human being he had ever met.

Fish explained that one of his favorite forms of sexual gratification consisted of shoving sewing needles up his crotch, just behind the scrotum. Wertham had difficulty believing him until X-rays revealed twenty-seven sewing needles lodged around Fish’s pelvic region.

At the end of it all, Fish was found guilty and sentenced to death. Even the jurors thought that he was insane but, as one of them explained later, felt that he should be

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electrocuted anyways. And he was, in 1936, he made history as the oldest man ever to be electrocuted at Sing Sing.

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Earle Leonard Nelson “Dark Strangler”, “Gorilla Killer” 1897-1928 Birthplace: San Francisco, California Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1926-1927 Method(s): Strangulation, Rape Perversion(s): Sadism, Necrophilia, Mutilation Number of Victims: 22+ Type of Victims: Landladies (Mainly) Hunting Grounds: San Francisco to Seattle Occupation at Large: Unknown (Unemployed) Family Status at Large: Single, No Children As young as a baby, Earle Nelson was able to unsettle those around him. The earliest surviving photograph of little Earle showed "a loose-mouthed degenerate infant with a vacant expression". The picture was taken soon after Earle was left an orphan by the unfortunate fact that both of his parents died of syphilis. At less than a year old, he was taken into the care of his maternal grandmother, a Biblecrazed widow who instilled in him a lifelong fascination with Scripture.

In spite of her efforts to provide Earle with a stable, happy home, his behavior became increasingly erratic. At the

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dinner table, he rarely socialized and devoured his food like a ferocious caged beast. He oddly managed to lose his clothing every time he left his house. And when he wasn't sunk into self-degrading depressions, he was instilled with uncontrollable rages. By the young age of seven, he was already expelled from grade school and was known around the neighborhood as a petty thief and shoplifter.

Shortly after his tenth birthday, in 1907, Earle suffered a serious head injury when he bicycled in front of a moving trolley car and was sent flying into the cobblestones. He remained in a coma for close to a week before gaining back consciousness. The severe brain damage he suffered very well could have been what played a role in his future psychopathology. But there is still the possibility that -- given his family inheritance of instability and the bizarre behavioral troubles he had manifested from infancy -- his life would have turned out the same even if he hadn't bicycled into a trolley car.

His formal education ended by age fourteen. He dropped out of school, took a succession of menial jobs, supplementing his meager earnings with burglary. By this time, he was living with his aunt Lillian, for the reason being that his grandmother had passed a few years earlier.

Despite Earle’s increasingly erratic behavior -- his tendency to spew obscenities at the dinner table, his growing obsession with the Book of Revelation, his odd habit of walking on his hands whenever a guest stopped by to visit -Lillian remained supportive of her peculiar nephew. When he

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was arrested for housebreaking in 1915, she made an emotional and tearful appeal on his behalf at his trial. Earle was sentenced to two years in San Quentin, with her plea being ignored.

Earle was enlisted in the military after he was released from prison during the height of the Great War, but spent a majority of the time in a naval mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as a constitutional psychopath. Discharged in 1919, the twenty-two-year-old Nelson became a hospital janitor and fell in love with a fifty-eight-year-old spinster named Mary Martin. Shortly afterwards, the preternatural couple married. The new bride slowly found herself living with a madman, continuously accusing her of infidelity whenever he wasn’t ranting about the Great Beast of the Book of Revelation and proclaiming himself Jesus Christ.

After Earle raped her while she was recuperating from a serious illness in a hospital bed, she decided to leave him. A short year later, he landed himself back into a mental hospital due to him attacking a twelve-year-old girl.

He was discharged from the hospital in 1925. In less than a year, he would embark on the rampage that made him the most feared and prolific serial killer of his era.

In 1926, he appeared at the doorstep of Mrs. Clara Newman, a sixty-year-old spinster who ran a boardinghouse in San Francisco. Nelson, looking for a place to stay, had seen a vacancy sign hung in her front window and decided to see the available room. Once he had the landlady alone, he strangled her with his bare hands, and raped her corpse.

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During the upcoming months, Nelson stalked along the West Coast -- from San Francisco to Seattle and back -- on a monstrous spree of murder and sexual mayhem. Ten more women had their lives taken at his hands between February and November of 1926. All of his victims were landladies.

They were all strangled, then raped after their death. A majority of the corpses were concealed in small spaces -behind the basement furnace, in the trunk. By now, the press had given him a name, the “Dark Strangler”. A massive manhunt was underway along the West Coast.

Likely due to the West Coast manhunt, Nelson moved inland. He murdered Mrs. John Brerard, forty-nine, of Council Bluffs, Iowa. A few weeks later he strangled twentythree-year-old Bonnie Pace of Kansas City, Missouri. A short day afterwards he struck again, another Kansas City woman, twenty-eight-year-old Germania Harpin. He also choked to death Mrs. Harpin’s eight-month-old son but stuffing a rag down the child’s throat.

With these four more killings, a nationwide alert was now on for the monster. Witnesses provided the police with a description of the suspect: dark hair, stocky build, sloping forehead, protruding lips, and grotesquely oversized hands.

He, in retrospect, resembled an ape.

Heading eastward, between April and June he murdered four more women in Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. Then he headed north into Canada, where he was finally captured after murdering two women in Winnipeg, a sixteen-year-old flower girl named Lola Cowan and a

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housewife named Emily Patterson, whose corpses he stuffed under a bed.

Nelson, tried and convicted in November of 1927, was hanged the following January in Winnipeg. He went to his death clutching his Bible and was continually proclaiming his innocence. His blood rampage had lasted for slightly over a year -- February of 1926 until June of 1927 -- and during that short span of time, twenty-two victims met their death at the hands of the Gorilla Killer.

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Edward Gein “The Plainfield Ghoul”, “The Mad Butcher” 1906-1984 Birthplace: LaCrosse County, Wisconsin Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1954-1957 Method(s): Unknown Perversion(s): Sadism, (Possible) Cannibalism, Necrophilia Number of Victims: 2 (Known) Type of Victims: Middle-Aged Women Hunting Grounds: Plainfield, Wisconsin Occupation at Large: Unknown (Unemployed) Family Status at Large: Single, No Children “I had a compulsion to do it.”

Edward Gein grew up on a farmstead a few miles outside of Plainfield,Wisconsin, in a small town situated in an area that has been called the “Great Dead Heart” of Wisconsin.

His father, George, was a hard-ass who was quite possibly an alcoholic. Oddly, though George could be brutal when drunk, he was no match for his domineering wife, Augusta.

Then again, it’s hard to imagine it possible for anyone to come near Augusta’s ferocious willpower or her overall madness.

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Raised in a crazily religious atmosphere, she slowly developed into a ranting fanatic who harped on one single thought: the loathsomeness of sex. She only saw the world to be rotten and filthy. She fled the city of LaCrosse -- the place where Ed was born -- because she regarded it as modern-day Sodom, oozing with sin and perversion. But, to her dissatisfaction, Plainfield had turned out to be no better.

The small, God-fearing town was a hellhole of depravity. She kept her two boys -- Ed and Henry, his older brother -- in close proximity and imbued them with her own twisted sense of universal wickedness, the whorish ways of women, and the vileness of carnal love.

When George Gein died of a heart attack in 1940, not even his family was sorry to see him go. Left alone with their mother, the two boys fell deeper under her poisonous spell.

Henry, having some sense of Augusta’s destructive influence, tried to help Ed break away but he wouldn’t listen.

Ed worshipped his mother and did not take kindly to his brother’s criticisms.

Henry was found dead on the Gein's’ property in 1944 -presumably from a heart attack while putting out a brush fire.

Although, no one ever came up with a reasonable and convincing explanation for the strange bruises on the back of his head.

Now, it was just the two of them. Until, in 1945, Augusta suffered from a stroke. Ed tended to her day in and day out, though nothing he did ever seemed to be good enough. At times -- her voice slurring but still dripping in contempt -- she

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would call him a weakling, a failure, just like his father. At other times, she would beckon him at her side and Ed would crawl into her bed and cling to her. She would coo in his ear: he was her own little man and her baby. During the night, he would cry himself to sleep, praying for God to spare his mother’s life. Ed could never manage life without his mother, for she had told him herself.

But his prayers went unheard. A few months later, Augusta died after being stricken with another, even more devastating stroke. Ed Gein, thirty-nine-years-old, was left alone in his dark, empty, secluded world.

It was during this time that he began his descent into the chaos of unutterable madness. For a long period of time, no one seemed to notice. Being a loner his whole life, Ed started to keep even more to himself, locking himself behind the weather-beaten walls of his gloomy, ramshackle farmhouse. And in the rare occasion that he did venture out in public -- to run an errand in town, to perform some handyman chores, to drink an occasional beer at Mary Hogan’s roadside tavern -- he didn’t seem that much stranger than he had before. Although maybe a little dirtier, he had always been a queer one, ever since childhood.

People simply accepted his peculiarities.

He did seem to talk more about magazine articles he was fascinated by, including stories of Nazi atrocities, South Sea headhunters, and sex-change operations, and along with those came “jokes” he told. One day when Mary Hogan, the big, foul-mouthed tavern keeper, suddenly disappeared from

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her house, with only a pool of blood being left behind, Ed began kidding that she was staying over at his house. No one took truth from it since that was the kind of sick humor you’d expect from a weirdo like Ed Gein.

Even the stories about the odd and creepy things at his farmhouse didn’t faze most of the townspeople.

Neighborhood kids who had visited his house claimed to have seen shrunken heads hanging on his bedroom walls.

Eventually, the rumors made their way back to Ed, who always had a plausible explanation. The heads were World War II souvenirs that were sent to him by his cousin, or at least he said that they were. His neighbors shrugged it off since they trusted Ed to have weird souvenirs as such.

They never imagined that Ed was capable of hurting another human being. The man refused to go deer hunting because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

That is, until Bernice Worden disappeared.

It happened on the first day of deer hunting season -November 16th, 1957. Late in the afternoon, Frank Worden returned home from a day in the woods and proceeded straight to the corner hardware store managed by his mother, Bernice. Surprisingly, she was nowhere to be found.

Searching and searching, Worden discovered a trail of dried blood leading from the storefront out the back door. There, he also discovered a sales receipt for a half gallon of antifreeze made out to Worden’s last customer: Ed Gein.

Once the police arrived at Ed’s farmhouse to \him about Mrs. Worden, they found the body of a fifty-eight-year-old

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grandmother in the summer kitchen behind the house.

Hanging by her heels from a pulley, she had been beheaded and disemboweled -- resembling a butchered deer, strung up and dressed.

The mortified officers called for reinforcements and before long a dozen or more lawmen showed up at the farmhouse and began investigating the unspeakable contents of Ed Gein’s house of horrors. What they found during this neverending night was appalling behind any one person’s imagination.

Lampshades fashioned of skin. Chairs upholstered in human flesh. Soup bowls made from the sawed-off tops of human heads. A boxful of noses. A belt made of female nipples. A shade pull decorated with a pair of women’s lips.

A shoe box containing a collection of preserved female genitalia. The faces of nine women, carefully dried, stuffed with paper and mounted like hunting trophies on a wall. A skin vest, complete with breasts, which had been fashioned from the tanned upper torso of a middle-aged woman.

To be later found out, Ed confessed that during the nighttime he would lace the skin around himself and go mincing around the farmhouse, pretending to be his mother.

In the early morning, after much searching through the ghastly clutter of Gein’s home, an investigator discovered a bloody burlap sack shoved under a fetid mattress. Inside this mattress was a freshly severed head. Two tenpenny nails, each with a loop of twine tied to the end of it, were inserted in the ears. The head was, of none other than, Bernice

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Worden’s. Ed Gein was undoubtedly going to hang it on the wall as one of his many decorations.

In the beginning, everyone assumed that Ed had been running a murder factory. But during his confessions he made a claim that seemed to be almost too incredible to accept. He wasn’t a mass murderer at all, or at least he insisted. Yet, he had killed a total of two women -- Bernice Worden and the tavern keeper Mary Hogan, whose preserved, peeled-off face had been found among Ed’s gruesome collection. As for the rest of the body parts, Ed revealed that he had gotten them from local cemeteries. For the past twelve years of his life, ever since his mother’s death, he had been a grave robber, turning to the dead for the companionship he could not find among those who were living.

In the strict definition of a “serial killer”, Ed was not one. A term that best describes him is a ghoul.

Gein spent the remainder of his days locked in multiple mental institutions. Long before his death, caused by cancer at the age of seventy-eight, he had been immortalized in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, based on a novel whose author -Robert Bloch -- had been inspired by Gein. When Ed died on July 26th, 1984, they took his body back to Plainfield and buried it next to his mothers. Ed Gein was back where he has always belonged.

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Harvey Murray Glatman “Glamour Girl Slayer”, “The Lonely-Hearts Killer” 1928-1959 Birthplace: Bronx, New York Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1957-1958 Method(s): Rape, Strangulation Perversion(s): Sadism, Dominance, Necrophilia, Fetishism Number of Victims: 3-4 Type of Victims: L.A. Female Models Hunting Grounds: California Occupation at Large: Unknown (Unemployed) Family Status at Large: Single, No Children Harvey Glatman, born in the Bronx in 1927, moved to Denver with his parents, Albert and Ophelia, while in grade school. He grew up to resemble a flesh-and-blood version of the nerdy Milhouse from The Simpsons -- with his big nose, Dumbo ears, and horn-rimmed glasses. His lifelong fear of the opposite sex was very clear from a young age. A socially maladroit loner, how couldn’t speak to another girl without uncontrollably blushing.

He was, as well, a precocious sex pervert, indulging in peculiar erotic practices at a surprisingly young age.

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Glatman was four years old when his mother walked into his bedroom to find him naked, with one end of a taut string tied around his penis, the other attached to a dresser drawer. It was the first manifestation of the odd rope fetish that would dominate Glatman’s life and ultimately lead to the terrible death of three women.

By the time that Harvey turned eleven, he was heavily into autoerotic asphyxiation, a perilous activity: putting his head in a noose, throwing the rope over a rafter, and choking himself while he masturbated with his free hand. Once his parents discovered him playing this “game”, they consulted a doctor who attributed it to “growing pains.” He assured to the Glatmans that their son would grow out of it.

Glatman’s perverse compulsion only grew stronger and worse. In high school, he began breaking into homes, coming away from one of these forays with a stolen .26caliber handgun. Soon he had progressed from thievery to sexual assault. Sneaking into the houses of attractive young women, he would tie them up at gunpoint and hold them while he masturbated.

In June of 1945, while awaiting trial on a burglary charge, the seventeen-year-old Glatman abducted a woman from Denver and subjected her to the usual molestation before driving her home. She immediately informed the police and, before long, Glatman was behind the Colorado State Prison bars.

Paroled after less than a year, Glatman -- at the urging of his parents, hoping he could put his checkered past behind

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him -- moved to Yonkers, New York, finding a job as a TV repairman -- a helpful skill he learned in prison. He managed to stay out of trouble for less that one month. In August of 1946, brandishing a toy pistol, he accosted a pair of young lovers at midnight, bound the man with a length of rope, and began fondling the woman. Slowly freeing himself from the bonds, the boyfriend attacked Glatman, who drew a pocket knife and slashed at the man’s shoulders, then fled into the night shadows.

He headed for Albany, boarding a train that night. There, a few days later, he made a botched assault on a nurse, afterwards mugging two middle-aged women. The police -on the lookout for someone who was targeting women -spotted Glatman two days later, while he was following a potential victim along a darkened street. While searching him, they found his toy pistol, a pocketknife, and a length of stout rope. Shortly after, Glatman -- only nineteen years old -found himself back in prison, with a sentence of five to ten years.

Glatman was evaluated by a prison psychiatrist who diagnosed him as a “psychopathic personality, schizophrenic type” with “sexually perverted impulses as the basis for his criminality.” Despite this assessment, he was back on the streets after less than three years, winning parole.

Being released into parental custody, he returned to Denver, moved in with his mother, and spent the next four and a half years working at various odd jobs and checking in with his parole officer. In early 1957, having earned his full

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liberty, he moved to Los Angeles, where his dormant psychopathic cravings burst into full, deadly bloom.

Working as a TV repairman, Glatman began to frequent the seedy photography clubs where sex-starved creeps could shoot “art pictures: of young, naked models. Many of these women were aspiring starlets, seeking out a living any way that they could. They also accepted side-jobs. Glatman, using the pseudonym “Johnny Glenn,” approached a nineteen-year-old girl named Judy Dull. He gave her the story that he worked as a freelance photographer for a true detective magazine and asked if she would be interested posing for him. The pay was twenty dollars an hour, and Judy accepted.

Glatman, taking her to his apartment, explained that she would have to be bound and gagged and look convincingly frightened, as though she were about to be raped. Whatever apprehensions Judy Dull might have been having, were allayed by the innocuous appearance of the goofy-looking Glatman. Trussed up and placed in an armchair, the young girl throw herself into character -- holding a terrified expression and twisting in her seat -- while Glatman snapped away. All at once, things turned bad. Pulling out a gun, he undid her bonds and forced her to strip, then repeatedly raped her. When darkness came, he drove her out to the desert, strangled her with a length of sash cord, took some photographs of her corpse, and left her there for the coyotes and buzzards.

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Two more victims followed Judy: a twenty-four-year-old divorcee he met at a lonely hearts club and a former striptease dancer who, similar to Judy, posed for a seedy “modeling agency”. Both were killed in Glatman’s signature style: trussed, photographed, raped at gunpoint, garroted, then posed after death and photographed again before being dumped in the desert.

During the summer of 1958, a state patrolman driving the Santa Ana freeway came upon a man and a woman struggling beside a car parked on the shoulder. Stopping to investigate, the officer found Glatman grappling with a twenty-eight-year-old model named Lorraine Vigil, who had managed to wrestle Glatman’s gun away from him as he was attempting to abduct her.

In custody, Glatman confessed to everything. While searching his apartment, police discovered a toolbox containing his horrifying photo collection. In some of the pictures, the women were fully dressed, whereas in other pictures, the women were partly or completely nude. Bound and gagged, they all wore terrified expressions. The most appalling photographs of them all, however, were the ones that he snapped of each victim after her death, the limbs carefully arranged, the corpses posed just so for his camera.

After pleading guilty, Glatman was sentenced to death. On September 18th, 1959, he died in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

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John Wayne Gacy “Killer Clown” 1942-1994 Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Time at Large: 1972-1978 Method(s): Rape, Torture, Strangulation Perversion(s): Sadism, Pedophilia Number of Victims: 33-34 Type of Victims: Teenage Boys/Young Men Hunting Grounds: Chicago, Illinois Occupation at Large: Businessman, Politician, Clown Family Status at Large: Married, No Children “A clown can get away with murder.”

Awakened in the middle of the night by shrill, continuous shrieks coming from the house behind her own, a neighbor had called the police. A squad car was dispatched to John Wayne Gacy’s brick ranch house in the Chicago suburb of Norwood Park. But the officers who questioned the owner came away convinced that nothing had gone wrong. Then, a fifteen-year-old boy named Robert Piest disappeared.

Piest was an ambitious, bright student, working after school as a stock boy in a pharmacy. On December 11, 1978 -- the day of his disappearance -- he told his mother

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that he was leaving the drugstore early to see a man about a summer job. The man’s name was John Wayne Gacy, and he was a local building contractor.

Once Piest’s parents reported that their son was missing, the cops put a tracer on Gacy and discovered that he had done jail time ten years earlier. The charge was sodomy and the victim had been a fifteen-year-old boy.

After a short period of time, Gacy was under arrest and a team of investigators was headed for his house with a search warrant. As the searched through the rooms for clues, they turned up suspicious and increasingly ominous bits of evidence -- pornographic magazines featuring sex between older men and younger boys. A vibrating dildo traced with fecal matter. And, stashed throughout the house and garage, personal items that clearly belonged to teenage boys: jewelry, clothes, wallets.

Lastly, they came upon a trapdoor in a living room closet that opened into a flooded crawl space. After draining the crawl space, the inspectors lowered themselves into the putrid muck. They uncovered the sickening evidence of horrendous crimes: lard-like globs of decomposed flesh and a variety of human bones, some of them blackened with rot, others covered with dried, mummified flesh.

Confronted by the police with their discoveries, Gacy immediately confessed to the atrocities that would mark him as one of America’s most monstrous serial killers: the torture-murder over a period of half a dozen years of thirtythree young men.

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The news seemed completely unbelievable, not only because of the enormity of the crimes -- which set a new, nightmarish record -- but also because of Gacy’s known and public persona. As far as the world was concerned, John Wayne Gacy was a pillar of the community -- a successful, hard-working businessman who still found the time to devote himself to community affairs and charitable causes. One of his favorite activities was dressing up as “Pogo the Clown” and performing for sick children at the local hospital. He was, as well, active in local politics and a valued member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Photographs of him shaking hands with the mayor of Chicago and First Lady Rosalynn Carter hanged on the walls of his home office. But a very different picture emerged in the course of his examination by court-appointed psychiatrists.

Gacy grew up to be a pudgy hypochondriac whose homosexual drives were a source of profound self-loathing, was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father -- who spent much of his time riding his son as a “sissy.” Attempting to appear “normal,” he married early and settled down in Waterloo, Iowa, where he ran a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Even while he was cultivating this unimpeachable persona, he was leading a secret life as a seducer and molestor of underage males. Arrested for sodomy in 1968, he was sentenced to a ten-year jail term. His wife filed for a divorce on the day of his sentencing.

He proved to be such a model prisoner that he was paroled after less than two years. Relocating to Chicago, he

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married again and starting a contracting business. Before long, his darkest impulses reasserted themselves -- a thousand times worse than before. He became a human predator, a cunning, remorseless sadist who tortured and murdered for his own sick pleasure.

Although some of his victims were acquaintances or employees, the majority were street hustlers and runaways.

Gacy, sometimes posing as a cop, would snare his prey at the bus station or the local gay district, “Bughouse Square.”

Returning to his house, he would lock the young men in handcuffs, then spend hours sodomizing and torture him before committing the final outrage -- the “rope trick.”

Looping a length of nylon rope around the victim’s neck, Gacy inserted a wooden hammer handle through the cord, twisting the handle slowly, reaching his own sexual climax as the victims strangled to death.

Once the boy was dead, Gacy buried their remains in the crawl space. Twenty-nine decomposed corpses were recovered from the muck beneath his house. At some point, Gacy ran out of room in his crawl space and dumped the bodies in a nearby river.

Gacy tried to convince the court that he suffered from split-personality disorder and shouldn’t be punished for his crimes since they were committed by an alter ego named “Jack.” The jury did not accept his insanity plea and sentenced him to death in March of 1980.

Fourteen years passed before the sentence was finally carried out. During that time, he turned out scores of

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grotesquely cheery painting -- many consisting of circus clowns and Disney characters. These paintings became coveted collectibles among connoisseurs of such things. He also took great pride in his sinister celebrity, bragging that he had been the subject of “eleven hardback books, thirty-one paperbacks, two screenplays, one movie, one off-Broadway play, five songs, and over 5,000 articles.”

Just after midnight on May 10, 1994, he was executed by lethal injections and his last words were: “Kiss my ass.”

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Gary Heidnik “Brother Bishop” 1943-1999 Birthplace: Eastlake, Ohio Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1986-1987 Method(s): Rape, Torture, Strangulation Perversion(s): Sadism, Dominance, Fetishism, Necrophilia, Cannibalism Number of Victims: 2 Type of Victims: Preferred Mentally Retarded Black Women Hunting Grounds: Pennsylvania Occupation at Large: Unknown (Unemployed) Family Status at Large: Single, 4+ Children Vincent Nelson hadn’t seen his girlfriend, Josefina Rivera, since Thanksgiving 1987, when she stormed out of his apartment after a bitter fight. As expected, he was amazed when she suddenly showed up at his front door four months later, nearly at midnight. It wasn’t just her unexpected reappearance that shocked him. It was more her physical appearance, resembling a concentration camp victim -haggard and ghastly.

The most shocking of all was the unbelievable story that Josefina had experienced. Barely keeping her hysteria under

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control, she poured out an incredible tale of horror to Nelson -- how she and numerous other women had been kept chained in a basement by a madman who had subjected them to four months of rape, beatings, and torture. Two of the girls had even died. The madman -- whose name was Gary Heidnik -- had chopped up the body of the first murder victim and forced Josefina and the other captives to eat the flesh of the dead women. Of course Josefina Rivera looked like hell, she had been living there for the past four months.

Nelson’s first impulse was to hunt down Heidnik himself but, after reconsidering, he called 911 instead. The cops were dubious at first, but their skepticism gave way to horror after they had obtained a search warrant and broke into Heidnik’s North Philadelphia home early the next morning.

Josefina had been telling the truth. Heidnik’s basement was a torture dungeon. Inside of the dank, filthy cellar, the cops found two half-naked black women chained to the popes and a third, completely naked, imprisoned in a shallow, plankcovered pit.

Upstairs, they found grisly support for Josefina’s accusation. Carefully stored in Heidnik’s kitchen freezer was a woman’s chopped-off forearm and a charred human rib bone in a roasting pan inside the oven. Gary Heidnik had indeed force-fed human flesh to his captives and turned them into cannibals.

By this time, Heidnik was under arrest. Across the country, headlines read: “Philadelphia Torture Dungeon” and “Heidnik’s House of Horrors.” Americans, staggered by the

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story, shook their heads and asked themselves one question: What monster could commit such atrocities?

Gary Heidnik had been born with some real potential. He possessed a 130-point IQ and the kind of stock market savvy that makes for great Wall Street success. But Heidnik was not destined for a career on Wall Street, his parents made certain of that.

His father, a savage disciplinarian, was the kind of man who dealt with his son’s bed-wetting problem by hanging the stained bedsheets out of the front window for the entire community to see. His mother was a drunkard who left the family when Gary was only two years old, she ultimately committed suicide.

By the time that Gary entered into the army in 1962, he was beginning to manifest the severe psychological problems that would afflict him for his entire life. Between the time that the army discharged him for mental disability in 1963 and the day of his arrest nearly a quarter century away, he would be in and out of psychiatric institutions twenty-one times. On top of that, he made more than a dozen suicide attempts through hanging, drug overdose, and reckless driving. One time, he even tried committing suicide by smashing up a lightbulb and forcing himself to swallow the pulverized glass.

During more lucid periods, Heidnik applied himself in multiple, various pursuits. He trained as a practical nurse.

And with the savings from his army pension, he purchased a three-story house and became a landlord. He also “found

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Jesus”. In 1971, he incorporated the United Church of the Minister of God, elected himself bishoped, and attracted a large amount of followers, who contributed $1,500 to the operation. He invested the funds in the stock market and, within ten years, built up a half-million-dollar portfolio.

Heidnik’s sexual tastes were for mentally retarded black women. On of his many girlfriends bore him a daughter in 1978. In May of that same year, Heidnik and his girlfriend drove up to a mental institution in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where his girlfriend’s sister, Alberta had resided for the past twenty years. They got permission to take Alberta out for a day and when they failed to bring her back, the cops were alerted. They found Alberta scared out of her mind in Heidnik’s basement. Medical tests revealed that she had been raped and sodomized, with her throat infected with gonorrhea from forced oral sex.

Heidnik was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to three to seven years in the penitentiary. He ended up only serving our years, most in various mental institutions. One day, halfway through his sentence, Heidnik wrote a message and passed it along to his guard. He claimed he couldn’t talk anymore because the devil had shoved a cookie down his throat. For the next two and a half years, Heidnik was a mute.

He married a Filipino mail-order bride who bore him a son following his discharge. She ended up abandoning him after tiring of being forced to watch him have sex with assorted black prostitutes. Shortly after her leaving, Heidnik became obsessed with a plan to create a baby factory in his

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basement. His overall intention was the kidnap, imprison, and impregnate ten women, Josefina Rivera, a twenty-sixyear-old part-time prostitute, became the first unlucky victim in his scheme. Heidnik picked her up on Thanksgiving Day and took her back to his apartment. Once they finished having sex, he performed the “Heidnik Maneuver” on her, throttling her into submission. THen he forced her into the basement and chained her to a pipe.

Two days after, he added another victim to his horror harem -- a mildly retarded African-American acquaintance named Sandra Lindsay. The women were subjected to daily torture, beatings, and rape. Their diet consisted of oatmeal and bread, with the occasional dog treat. Before long, five women were held hostage in Heidnik’s hellhole.

Heidnik’s punishments escalated, becoming more insane every day. He subjected them to electrical shocks and shoved screwdrivers in their ears. When Sandra Lindsay died after dangling by her wrists from a pipe for a week, Heidnik dragged her body up the stairs, dismembered it with a power saw, cooked her head in a saucepan, roasted her rib cage in the oven, and ground up her flesh in a food processor. Then he mixed the ground meat with dog food and fed it to the surviving captives.

When twenty-three-year-old Deborah Dudley started to give him trouble, Heidnik decided to treat her to some electric shock therapy. He threw her into a water-filled pit and stuck a live electric wire in after her. Once the wire touched her chains, she was dead. Heidnik stored her body

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in his freezer for a few days, then drove out to Wharton State Forest in New Jersey and dumped it into the woods.

Two days later, Rivera managed to escape captivity and made a beeline for her boyfriend’s apartment. On July 1, 1988, Gary Heidnik was found guilty on eighteen counts, including two of first-degree murder. When his father was informed that his son had been sentenced to die, he replied with “I’m not interested.” Heidnik was executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999.

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Jeffrey Dahmer “The Milwaukee Cannibal”, “The Milwaukee Monster” 1960-1994 Birthplace: Milwaukee Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Homosexual Time at Large: 1978-1991 Method(s): Rape, Bludgeoning, Dismemberment Perversion(s): Sadism, Necrophilia, Cannibalism Number of Victims: 17 Type of Victims: Young Men Hunting Grounds: Ohio, Wisconsin Occupation at Large: Factory Laborer Family Status at Large: Single, No Children “There comes a point where a person has to be accountable for what he’s done... I alone am the one who is responsible for what’s happened. The only motive that there ever was was to completely control a person... And keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them.”

Something was very wrong. There was something wrong with Jeffrey Dahmer -- certainly, warning signs appeared along the way. Perhaps the horror could have been avoided.

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But then again, millions of people suffer from emotional disturbances during their adolescence and do not grow up to be like Jeffrey Dahmer.

He was born in Milwaukee but raised in Bath, Ohio -- a nice, comfortable middle-class community. His parents detested each other and were -- as Dahmer had later recalled -- “constantly at each other’s throats.” Their endless bickering left little time for their eldest son. Totally friendless and neglected, Dahmer slowly indulged himself deeper and deeper into his own little world of fantasy.

He took up a unique and sick fantasy: killing small animals, skinning them, and scraping off their meat with acid. He displayed his collection in a backyard shed of squirrel and chipmunk skeletons. He created his own, private pet cemetery on the side of his house. Sometimes, however, he never buried the bodies. Sometimes, he staked them into trees.

Fully starved for attention, he resorted to desperate measures. Though he honestly did well in high school, his behavior was often times bizarre. He would emit sheeplike bleats during class time and collapse in the hallways in mock-epileptic fits. When the high school honor roll society assembled for their yearbook portrait, Dahmer sneaked into the picture. The prank was yet to be discovered until it was developed, and the editor was very unhappy. He took a Magic Marker and blotted out Dahmer’s face so that in, in the published picture, Dahmer stands surrounded by other students, his features veiled in the blackness.

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This veiled blackness greatly symbolizes the deadly darkness that had already begun to envelop Dahmer’s life.

He started to drink heavily and his fantasies of torture, mutilation, and death became more and more intense -nearly obsessive. One day, in 1975, several neighborhood boys, strolling through the woods behind the Dahmer house, came upon a shocking sight -- a decapitated dog’s head impaled on a stick. On a nearby tree, they found its skinned and gutted body.

During Dahmer’s senior year, in 1978, his parents’ marriage finally came to an end. The couple split up and went their separate ways, leaving Dahmer alone in the house with nothing but his increasingly deranged fantasies.

Just a few weeks later, after his mother had abandoned him, he picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker named Steven Hicks. He invited him home and the two shared beers, talked, and had sex. Once Hicks announced that it was time for him to leave, Dahmer smashed him in the back of the skull with a barbell and strangled him. Then, dragging the body into the crawl space under the house, he dismembered it and stored the pieces in plastic bags. Shortly after, he buried the bones -- only to dig them back up, pulverize them with a sledgehammer, and scatter the fragments in a wooded ravine behind the house.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s career had just begun. He was eighteen years old. He tried college for a while, but ended up dropping out of the Ohio State University after only a short few months and enlisted in the army. To his friends, he was just a

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“regular guy” until he began to drink. When he drank, a different side of Dahmer emerged: aggressive, moody, defiant. He had enlisted for six years, but was discharged only after two.

He went to live with his grandmother near Milwaukee, in West Allis, and got a job in a blood bank. In 1985, he got a job at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company as a general laborer. That same year, some happened to Dahmer, something far more appalling -- his terrifying pathology, dormant for close to six years, came roaring back to life.

He started to hang out at a local gay bar. One night, he and a guy he had met took a room at the Ambassador Hotel.

The two men got drunk, had sex, and passed out. When Dahmer awoke the next morning, the other man was dead, with blood dripping from his mouth. He had no recollection of causing any harm to the young man. He went to a nearby shopping mall and purchased a suitcase, which he took back up to the hotel room. After stuffing the corpse inside the suitcase, he called a cab and brought the body back to his grandmother’s house, where he dismembered and disposed of it.

After one year, Dahmer killed his next victim: another gay man he picked up at the club and took back to his grandmother’s house. Dahmer kept the victim’s skull as a souvenir after scraping it clean of flesh. Another victim soon followed.

Dahmer had several encounters with the law during these next few years. In 1986, he was arrested for lewd and

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lascivious behavior after urinating in front of some children.

Two years later, he lured a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy to his apartment in Milwaukee, drugged him with a sedated drink, and fondled him. Getting arrested on a charge of second-degree assault and enticement of a child for immoral purposes, he spent ten months in jail before he was released in March of 1990.

During the upcoming year, Dahmer butchered three more young men. At one point, neighbors noticed a putrid odor leaking from his apartment. When knocking on Dahmer’s door to complain, however, he explained that his freezer had broken and that the meat had rotted. His apologetic manner was convincing to the point where his neighbors believed him.

In May of 1991, he got even closer to being caught.

Shortly after midnight one night, two women spotted Dahmer chasing a naked and bleeding teenage boy down an alley.

Of course the cops were called, but when they arrived to question him Dahmer used his powers of persuasion to save his skin once again. He had managed to convince the cops that he and the boy were gay lovers engaging in a harmless spat. The police left the dazed fourteen-year-old boy in Dahmer’s care.

Later, the teenager’s butchered remains were found amid the other ghastly human debris in Jeffrey Dahmer’s charnel house.

During the next couple months, Dahmer’s escalation was increasingly at a detrimental speed, and he claimed five

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more victims. Then, on a muggy night in July 1991, two Milwaukee patrolmen saw a dazed man stumbling toward them, a pair of handcuffs dangling from one of his wrists.

Flagging down their squad car, gestured uncontrollably toward Dahmer’s apartment building and stammered on about attempted murder. The police investigated and were left in disbelief with what they had found: Jeffrey Dahmer’s chamber of horrors.

A drawers of the bedroom highboy were crammed with various Polaroids of body parts and mutilated corpses -including one excruciatingly disgusting shot of a torse eaten away from the nipples down by acid. This was just the beginning of the nightmare. Inside the freezer, police found three human heads and an assortment of organs: intestines, lungs, livers, kidneys, and a heart. Dahmer told the police that he was saving the heart to “eat later.”

Another had was stored in the refrigerator near an open box of baking soda. Seven skulls and five complete skeletons were stashed in various locations around the apartment, along with miscellaneous remains: bone fragments, decomposed hands, sexual organs. The police also found three electric saws, bottles of acid, chloroform, and formaldehyde. Altogether, these ghastly trophies represented the remains of eleven victims, although Dahmer would later confess to a staggering seventeen murders.

The revelation of Dahmer’s horrifying deeds sent shock waves across America. At his 1992 trial, his attorney argued that the very nature of Dahmer’s atrocities -- “skulls in a

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locker, cannibalism, making zombies, necrophilia, lobotomies, defleshing” -- was instant proof of his insanity.

The jury, however, rejected the insanity defence and Dahmer was found guilty. During his own final statement, Dahmer expressed a desire to die -- a wish that was fulfilled in November of 1994, when he was bludgeoned to death by another prisoner.

Dahmer was then cremated, though not before his brain was removed, creating a bitter dispute between his parents.

Arguing that her son “always said that if he could be of any help, he wanted to do whatever he could,” Dahmer’s mother petitioned to have the rain donated to science for research into the neurological roots of antisocial behavior. His father, on the contrary -- claiming that he wanted “to put the whole thing behind him” -- was eager to have the organ destroyed.

The matter was settled when a judge, citing Dahmer’s own wishes as conveyed in his final statement, and ordered the brain cremated.

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Theodore Bundy 1946-1989 Birthplace: Burlington, Vermont Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1971-1978 Method(s): Rape, Strangulation, Bludgeoning Perversion(s): Sadism, Necrophilia, Dominance, Fetishism Number of Victims: 30-36+ Type of Victims: Young, Attractive Women Hunting Grounds: Washington, Utah, Florida, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho, California Occupation at Large: (Unknown) Unemployed Family Status at Large: No Wife, No Children “You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!” No one ever expected that Ted Bundy was capable of committing such violent atrocities, considering that he gave off such a positive perspective among his community. He was handsome, well-educated, very sociable -- with great communication skills and a keen sense of humor. However, the real Ted Bundy became one of the greatest known killers in American history -- responsible for murdering at least

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twenty-three young females, and quite possible a staggering thirty-nine.

Bundy was born in a Vermont home for unwed mothers on November 24, 1946, by Louise Cowell, but was initially raised by his grandparents. He believed that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his elder sister, a fairly common circumstance in illegitimate births at the time.

His mother married and his stepfather made numerous attempts to integrate young Bundy into the family, but Bundy just became increasingly more isolated as four more children were added, preferring his own company. Despite his introverted personality, he did well and school and his natural good looks increased his popularity, therefore improving his self-esteem.

Bundy, attending the University of Washington in 1967, met a girl who had the most profound effect on his life. A fellow student, Stephanie Brooks, was from a wealthy family with whom he fell deeply in love with. Her feelings weren’t as intense as Bundy’s, however, and when she graduated in 1968 she ended their relationship abruptly.

His devastation over Brooks had a major impact on his life, and she became a lifelong obsession. He dropped out of high school and found out who his true mother is, which was another significant psychological blow. As if to prove both Brooks and his family wrong, he indulged himself into his studies and became an honors student in his chosen field,

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psychology. He also had a keen interest in politics and became a charismatic Republican campaigner.

Around this same time, he cultivated a new relationship with Meg Anders, a divorcee with a young daughter, but his obsession with Brooks still never ceased. When he met up with Brooks again in 1973, she was amazed at the transformation in Bundy’s fortunes and they rekindled their romance, with neither Brooks nor Anders knowing about the other.

Just as Brooks began to believe that their relationship might lead to marriage, Bundy cut off all contact with her abruptly, just as she had done to him six years previously.

This revenge brought Bundy little comfort, however, and his rage slowly increased into a series of brutal attacks on women, who all shared Brooks’ physical characteristics -attractive students with long, dark hair.

The exact number of women Bundy killed will never be known. There is also some debate of when he started killing, but most sources say that he began his murderous rampage around 1974. By this time, he graduated from the University of Washington and had been accepted to law school in Utah.

Bundy even got a letter of recommendation from the Republican governor of Washington after working on his campaign.

Around this time, many women in the Seattle area and in nearby Oregon went missing. And stories circulated about some of the victims last being seen in the company of a young, dark-haired man known as “Ted.” He often lured his

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victims into his car by pretending to be injured and asking for help. Their kindness proved to be a fatal mistake.

Bundy moved to Utah in the fall of 1974 to attend law school, and women began disappearing there as well. The following year, he was pulled over by the police. A search of his vehicle uncovered a cache of burglary tools -- a crowbar, a facemask, a rope, and handcuffs. He was arrested for possession of these tools and the police began to link him to much more sinister crimes.

In 1975, Bundy was arrested for kidnapping Carol DaRonch, one of the few women to escape his clutches. He was convicted and received a one-to-fifteen-year jail sentence. Two years later, Bundy was indicted on murder charges for the death of a young Colorado woman. He decided to act as his own lawyer in this case. During a trip to the courthouse library, Bundy jumped out of the window and made his first escape. He was captured eight days later.

In December of 1977, Bundy escaped from custody again.

He climbed out of a hole he made in the ceiling of his cell, a hole so small that he dropped more than thirty pounds to fit through it. Authorities did not discover that Bundy had escaped for 15 hours, which gave the serial killer a big head start and he eventually made his way to Tallahassee, Florida.

There, on the night of January 14, 1978, Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. He attacked four of the young female residents, and killed two of them. Then on February 9, Bundy kidnapped and murdered a twelve-year-old girl named Kimberly Leach. These crimes

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marked the end of his murderous rampage as he was soon pulled over by the police that February.

In July of 1979, Bundy was convicted for the two Chi Omega murders .The most damning evidence came from his own viciousness. The bite marks on one of the bodies was a definitive match for Bundy. He was given the death penalty twice for those crimes and was given a third death sentence the following year in the murder of Kimberly Leach.

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Gary Ridgway “The Green River Killer”, “Green River Gary”, “The Riverman” 1949-Present Birthplace: Salt Lake City, Utah Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1982-1998 Method(s): Strangulation Perversion(s): Sadism, Necrophilia, Dominance Number of Victims: 71-90+ Type of Victims: Mainly Prostitutes Hunting Grounds: Washington Occupation at Large: Painter for Trucking Company Family Status at Large: Married, One Child “Do I look like the Green River Killer?”

In our country, one of the most notorious and baffling serial murder cases of the past quarter century took a sudden auspicious turn in fall of 2001, over ten years after most people had given up on it. Between 1982 and 1984, forty-nine young women were stabbed to death or strangled and their bodies were dumped at various woodland sites.

Some were runaways and transients, though the majority were prostitutes working a strip along the Seattle-Tacoma highway. Despite a prodigious investigation that lasted

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nearly a decade, cost $15 million, accumulated four thousand pieces of physical evidence, and required the help of everyone from FBI profiler John Douglas to Ted Bundy (who offered his own unique insights into the operations of the psychopathic mind), the “Green River Killer” magically eluded capture. When the task force finally disbanded in 1990, there was very little hope that he would ever be identified.

Until November of 2001, when all of that changed suddenly and dramatically -- when Gary Leon Ridgway was arrested for the relatively minor offense of “loitering for the purpose of soliciting prostitution.” A married fifty-two-year-old father who lived in the Seattle suburb of Austin and worked as a painter for a local trucking company. He had a number of previous run-ins with the law, all involving prostitutes. In 1980, a hooker he had picked up on the “Sea-Tac” strop accused him of driving him out to the woods and trying to strangle her. Charges were dropped when Ridgway claimed that the woman had started to bite him while performing oral sex, and he only choked her to make her stop.

Two years after, he was arrested for propositioning a police decoy during a prostitution sting. Admitting that his compulsion to pick up prostitutes was akin to an alcoholic’s craving for drink, he pleaded guilty and was given a firm slap on the wrist. In 1984, he was a prime suspect in the disappearances of one of the Green River Killer’s victims, but was released from custody after passing a polygraph test.

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Kiddingly, his coworkers at the Kenworth Truck Company began calling him “Green River Gary” -- or “ G.R.” for short.

To the police officers, on the contrary there was nothing remotely funny about the situation. By 1988, Ridgway was still regarded as a “person of interest” by investigators, who obtained a warrant to search his house (which yielded no evidence), as well as a court order that directed him to provide a sample by chewing on a piece of gauze.

This piece of evidence ultimately led to the big break in the case. When Ridgway was arrested again in the fall of 2001 for soliciting prostitution, the improved technology allowed forensic scientists to match the DNA in his saliva with semen found in three of the victims. His employment records were immediately subpoenaed, and a thorough check revealed that his absences from his job paralleled with the disappearances of many of the Green River victims.

Gary Ridgway was formally charged with the death of four women on December 5, 2001. “What cracked this case, in a word, was science,” on official declared. Due credit was also given to tenacious police work, particularly on King County sheriff Dave Reichert, who could barely contain his jubilation when he saw the results of the DNA tests. After pursuing his quarry for nearly twenty years, the hunt was finally over.

Ridgway’s responsibility for the Green River killings was confirmed on November of 2003, when -- as a part of a plea agreement that spared him from being sentenced the death penalty -- he stood in a Seattle courtroom and admitted to the murder of forty-eight women.

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Richard Chase “The Dracula Killer”, “The Vampire of Sacramento” “The Vampire Killer” 1950-1980 Birthplace: Santa Clara County, California Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1977-1978 Method(s): Shooting Perversion(s): Sadism, Cannibalism, Necrophilia, Fetishism Number of Victims: 6 Type of Victims: At Random Hunting Grounds: California Occupation at Large: Unknown Family Status at Large: Single, No Children Allegedly abused by his mother while growing up, Richard Chase had already fulfilled enuresis, pyromania and precocious sadism -- the three main signs of destruction in adolescence -- at the age of ten. At a young age, he was already an alcoholic and a drug addict. He also suffered from erectile dysfunction.

When an adult, he became a hypochondriac, and eventually moved out of his mother’s home because he believed she was trying to poison him. He then moved into

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an apartment with some friends, who often complained about his abuse of alcohol, marijuana, and acid. Chase had no manners and paid no attention to guests, he would even sometimes walk around naked when his roommates had people over.

His roommates got sick of his quickly, and when they tried to throw him out, he refused. They ended up moving out themselves, leaving Chase alone in his apartment. He began to capture, kill, and disembowel animals alone in the apartment, then consume them raw. Sometimes he would blend them together with Coca-Cola and drink the remains, allegedly to prevent his heart from shrinking.

In 1975, he was involuntarily institutionalized after being treated at a hospital for blood poisoning, which he had contracted by injecting the blood from animals into his veins.

Fellow patients and healthcare professionals were puzzled by his obsession with blood, they even called him “Dracula�.

With that being said, they still thought he was harmless, that his obsession was limited to animal blood. His bizarre behavior continued while he was in treatment until he was pronounced safe and place in the care of his mother, who eventually prevented him from taking his anti-psychotic medications, allegedly because they dulled him, and got him his own apartment.

By 1977, he progressed from rabbits to larger mammals.

That year, police spotted him stumbling across the Nevada desert naked and covered in blood. In his car, they found a bucket of coagulated blood and two rifles that were used as

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spoons to stir the horrid concoction. Tests revealed the blood to be of cows, and Chase was released. But this blood collecting transformed from animals to human in rapid succession.

Chase’s first human victim was a middle-aged woman whom he shot dead on the street, with no feasible reason.

Then he began breaking into houses. In 1978, he barged into a Sacramento home and shot a twenty-two-year-old woman to death. He then proceeded to disembowel her body and cover himself in her blood. He used an empty yogurt cup to collect and drink her blood. His victim had been pregnant, only three months pregnant.

Four days following, he broke into the home of thirty-eightyear-old Evelyn Miroth and shot her to death along with her six-year-old son and a visiting female friend. He eviscerated Miroth, mutilated her face, and sodomized her. He also collected her blood and drank it. Chase committed a final outrage on the dead women by stuffing her mouth full of animal feces. But the worse was still to come.

Miroth had been babysitting her twenty-two-month-old nephew,. When the crime scene was discovered, the baby was missing. Chase had taken the little boy back to his lair, where he was decapitated and dumped in a box in a vacant lot.

A classic “disorganized� killer, Chase had left footprints and fingerprints all over the crime scenes and had even used the car of one of the victims. He was soon apprehended. In his apartment, the police discovered a

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vampire’s inner sanctum -- blood covering everything, including the blenders Chase used to mix his horrid zoophagous shakes.

Notably, given how crazily deranged he clearly was, Chase was declared legally sane. He was speedily convicted of six murders and sentenced to die in California’s gas chamber. FBI profilers interviewed him in prison and learned about several of his obsessions: his blood was turning to powder because he found a gooey substance underneath his soap dish; Nazis with ties to UFOs were following him; and somebody was trying to poison him in jail. In the very end, he escaped execution. In 1980, he died of an overdose of antidepressants that he had been hoarding in his death row cell.

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Edmund Kemper “The Co-Ed Killer” 1948-Present Birthplace: Burbank, California Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Time at Large: 1964-1973 Method(s): Shooting, Dismemberment Perversion(s): Sadism, Necrophilia, Cannibalism Number of Victims: 10 Type of Victims: At Random Hunting Grounds: California Occupation at Large: Unemployed Family Status at Large: Single, No Children “One side of me says, I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side of me says, I wonder what her head would look like on a stick?”

Born in 1948 in Burbank, California, Edmund Kemper was the middle child of E.E. and Clarnell Kemper. After his parents’ divorce in 1957, he moved with his mother and two sisters to Montana. Kemper had a difficult relationship with his alcoholic mother since she was very critical of him, and he blamed her for all of his problems. When he was ten years old, she forced him to live in the basement, away from his sisters to whom she feared he might harm in some way.

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Early signs began to emerge. He had a dark fantasy life, sometimes dreaming about killing his mother. He cut off the heads of his sisters’ dolls and coerced the girls into playing a game he called “gas chamber”, in which he had them blindfold him and lead him to a chair, where he pretended to writhe in agony until he “died.”

At the age of 13, Kemper killed his cat with a knife. He went to live with his father for a time, but ended up back with his mother. She decided to send the greatly troubled teenager to live with his paternal grandparents in North Fork, California.

Kemper despised living on his grandparents’ farm. Before going to live with them, he had already began learning about firearms. His grandparents took away his rifle after he killed several birds and other small animals. In August of 1964, Kempter turned on his grandparents. The fifteen-year-old shot his grandmother in the kitchen after an argument (some reports indicate that he stabbed her as well). When his grandfather returned home, Kemper went outside and shot him by his car, then hid the body. He called his mother, and she told him to call the police and explain what had happened.

Later, Kemper confessed that he shot his grandmother to “see what it felt like.” He added that he killed his grandfather so that the man wouldn’t have to find out that his wife had been murdered. For his murders, Kemper was handed over to the California Youth Authority. He underwent numerous tests to determine that he had an extremely high IQ and

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suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Eventually, Kemper was sent to Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

In 1969, Kemper was released. He was 21 years old. He was advised to not live with his mother because of her past abuse and his psychological issues involving her.

Completely neglecting this recommendation, he eventually joined with his mother in California. Clarnell Kemper had moved there after ending her third marriage and got a job with the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Kemper attended community college for a bit of time and worked various jobs. He eventually worked for the California Highway Department in 1971. Kemper applied to become a state trooper but was rejected for his size -- he weighed approximately 300 pounds and was 6 feet and 9 inches, leading to his nickname “Big Ed.� However, he continued to hang arounds one of the Santa Cruz police officers. One gave him a training-school badge and handcuffs, while another lent him a gun. Kemper even had a car that resembled a police cruiser.

That same year that he began working for the highway department, Kemper was hit by a car while out on his motorcycle. His arm was very badly injured and he received a $15,000 settlement in the civil suit he filed against the car’s driver. Unable to work, Kemper turned his mind towards other pursuits. He noticed a large number of young women hitchhiking around the area. He bought a new car and began storing the tools he thought he might need to fulfill his

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murderous compulsions -- including a gun, a knife, and handcuffs.

In the beginning, Kemper would pick up female hitchhikers and let them go. He offered two Fresno College students -Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa -- a ride in May of 1972.

They never made it to their destination and their families reported them missing. Nothing was known of their fates until August 15th, when a female head was discovered in the woods that was later identified as Pesce’s. Luchessa’s remains, however, were never found. Kemper later explained that he stabbed and strangled one of the women and stabbed the other. Afterwards, he brought the bodies back to his apartment and removed their heads and hands.

He also reportedly engaged in sexual activities with the corpses.

In January of 1973, Kemper continued to act upon his murderous impulses. He picked up another hitchhiker, Cindy Schall, and shot her. While his mother was out, Kemper went to her home and hid Schall’s corpse in his room there.

He dismembered her corpse the following day, and threw the parts into the ocean. Several parts were later discovered once they made their way to shore.

Kemper’s mother got him a campus parking sticker so that he could pick her up at the university. On February 5, 1973, he utilized that sticker to facilitate a double-murder. He drove to the campus after a fight with his mother and gave a ride to two students, Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu.

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Shortly after picking them up, he shot them. Kemper drove past campus security at the gates with two mortally wounded women in his car, surprisingly escaping without being caught.

After the murders, Kemper decapitated his two victims and continued to dismember the bodies, removed the bullets from their heads, and disposed of their parts in various locations. In March, some of the two girls’ remains were discovered by hikers near Highway 1 in San Mateo County.

Kemper’s last two killings took place in April of 1973. He went to his mother’s home, where the two of them had an unpleasant exchange. Kemper attacked his mother while she was asleep, first striking her in the head with a hammer, then cutting her throat with a knife. After removing her larynx, he jammed it into the garbage disposal in the kitchen -which promptly spat it back out into his face. “That seemed appropriate,” Kemper later told the police. “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.”

Kemper then hid her body and went out to a bar frequented by his police officer friends.

Later, he invited over a friend of his mother’s Sara Hallett.

Shortly after she arrived at the house, Kemper killed her and hid her body in a closet. He fled the area the day after.

After driving for days upon days, Kemper reached Pueblo, Colorado. There, he made a call to the Santa Cruz police to confess his crimes. At first, the police were hesitant to believe that they guy they knew as “Big Ed” was a serial killer. But he soon led them to all of the evidence they would need to prove that he was the infamous “Coed Killer”.

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He waited at the phone booth for the authorities to arrive and place him under arrest. He offered a full and sickeningly detailed confession of his crimes. At his trial, he was judged to be legally sane and convicted of eight counts of murder.

When the judge asked him what punishment he felt was suitable for his crimes, he replied, “death by torture.� He was sentenced to life in prison, where he still remains.

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Fritz Haarmann “The Butcher of Hanover”, “The Vampire of Hanover” 1879-1925 Birthplace: Hanover, German Empire Ethnicity: German (Caucasian) Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Homosexual Time at Large: 1918-1924 Method(s): Strangulation, Dismemberment, Biting Necks Perversion(s): Sadism, Vampirism, Pedophilia Number of Victims: 24-27+ Type of Victims: Boys and Young Men Hunting Grounds: Province of Hanover, Prussia Occupation at Large: Cigar Factory Employee, Soldier Family Status at Large: Single, One Child “My passion was so much stronger than the horror of the cutting and chopping.”

Born in Hanover on October 25, 1879, during the German Empire, Fritz was the sixth child of a poor couple, Ollie and Johanna. He was motivated by his mother to play with his sister’s dolls instead of engaging in boys’ activities. As expected, Fritz seemed to have a bit of a feminine personality. He also had sadistic tendencies in which he would tie up his sisters and also tap windows during the nighttime to cause rumors of supernatural creatures that

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roam around in the middle of the night. Around this time he had harbored a dislike for his father, whom he threatened to throw in jail since Ollie supposedly murdered a train driver.

Performing terribly in school, Fritz was sent to attend a military academy at Neu Breisach. He did well there, but was eventually discharged for medical reasons after having a series of seizures. Back in Hanover, he found a job at a local cigar factory.

In 1898, he was arrested for molesting several children, but was deemed psychologically unfit to stand trial and was sentenced to a mental institution. Fritz, six months into his stay, escaped and fled to Switzerland before returning to Germany at the age of 20. Around 1900, he seduced and married a woman named Erna Loewert, later impregnating her. Fritz desired the military life and abandoned Erna to pursue it.

Becoming a soldier, Fritz led a successful life under this employment. However, in 1901, all of that abruptly ended when he collapsed during an exercise and was diagnosed as having an unspecified mental deficiency. He was, again, discharged and sent back to live with his family.

His father made one last attempt to put Fritz in an asylum, but the local doctors merely deemed him as “morally inferior�.

Fritz attempted opening up his own small business, but it went bankrupt and was immediately closed down. A short period after this, he started a series of petty burglaries and con jobs to easily gain money and ended up spending close

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to a third of the following two decades being incarcerated for said crimes.

Because of his frequent arrests, he quickly became well known with the Hanover police, even becoming one of their informers after his latest release in 1918, just to redirect police attention to himself. Simultaneously, World War I began and he was hit hard by inflicted national poverty. Fritz also began a number of misdemeanor sexual offenses that went unnoticed by authorities mostly for the fact that the victims were too ashamed to file reports.

Suddenly, his misdemeanor offenses took a sickening turn.

Fritz snapped and murdered a seventeen-year-old youth named Friedel Rothe in September of 1918. Following from eyewitnesses accounts provided by Rothe’s friends and the pressure from Rothe’s family, authorities investigated Fritz’s residence and found him with a teenage boy in his bed, having been seduced by him for nearly nine months.

Fritz was arrested for sexual assault, but the police, for an unknown reason, never searched his house. As a result, he was cleared of any suspicion of Rothe’s murder. Eventually released, Fritz met Hans Grans at the Hanover central station, and the two quickly became friends. Their friendship soon blossomed into homosexual lovers. In early 1922, they moved into an apartment, which was located in the “haunted area” of Hanover. Around this time, Fritz started murdering young men again.

This time, he was luring them in by falsely identifying himself as a police officer. Hans became his accomplice

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after unexpectedly returning home to witness Fritz murder his second victim, a seventeen-year-old Fritz Franke. In the upcoming nine months, twelve men were murdered in this fashion, with their dismembered remains dumped at the Leine River and their valuables used to provide the couple with money. The killings went unnoticed, until May of 1924, when over 500 human bones belonging to Fritz’s victims started washing up downstream in the Leine River. Terror hovered over Hanover and citizens dubbed the killer as “The Butcher of Hanover”.

Fritz’s last victim was 17-year-old Erich de Vries, and at this time the police had begun an enormous manhunt for the serial killer. Suspicion quickly fell on him due to knowledge of his 1898 molestation crimes and the disappearance of Friedel Rothe years prior. Police silently watching over Fritz, and on June 22, they apprehended him after he attempted to lure in a would-be victim, Karl Fromm, from Hanover’s central station. Fromm had spent several days in Fritz’s apartment before, where he was sexually assaulted by him.

Fritz would later confess his intention of murdering Fromm, marking the first time that he was guided by moral principles, although it was ironically his downfall.

Police searched Fritz’s home and found walls stained with blood, to which Fritz alleged it to be an unhandy result of the illegal meat-trade business he ran there. However, police found clothing and belongings to his victims and arrested him on suspicion of the Hanover murders. Fritz confessed to being the perpetrator and claimed that the amount of lives he

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ended ranged from “somewhere between 50 and 70”, though police made it official that the true body count was measured to 24-27. He then helped officers in finding undiscovered parts of his victims and the dump sites at the Leine River. He was overall extremely cooperative in the investigation, unless he was (for example) confronted by families of his victims or conversing about decapitation, when he would become very withdrawn.

Fritz’s trial began in December of 1924 and was conducted at the Hannover Assizes. Considering that the term “serial killer” had yet to be coined, there were no words to describe Fritz other than “werewolf” or “vampire.” Hoping to take Hans with him to execution, he accused him of some of the murders, which the court actually came to believe. A notable aspect of the case was the shock that came to the public leading the discovery that Fritz was a police informant; therefore, the police never came to suspect him of the murders even though witnesses pointed him out as being with his last victims.

His trial lasted for two weeks and required two hundred witnesses to explain their accounts. He was found guilty of murdering all but three of the victims tied to him and sentenced to death by guillotine. In April of 1925, he was beheaded by guillotine, but not before muttering his last words, “I repent, but I do not fear death.” The remains of his victims were buried together in a grave at the Stockener Cemetery months before his execution, with a large, granite, triptych-style memorial inscribed with the victims’ names and

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ages being erected on April of 1928. Fritz’s head was preserved in a jar by scientists who used it in their studies to examine the structure of his brain. It is now being kept at the Gottingen medical school to this day.

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Robert Berdella “The Kansas City Butcher” 1949-1992 Birthplace: Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Homosexual Time at Large: 1984 Method(s): Rape, Torture, Suffocation/Asphyxiation Perversion(s): Sadism, Dominance Number of Victims: 6+ Type of Victims: Young Men Hunting Grounds: Kansas City, Missouri Occupation at Large: Store Owner Family Status at Large: Single, No Children “I have an obsession with the unattainable. I have to eliminate what I cannot attain.”

Robert Berdella was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in 1949 and was raised in a Catholic family, though he stopped attending church when he became a teenager. His father, who would beat him regularly with a leather strap, worked as a dye setter for the Ford Motor Company and his mother was a homemaker. When he was seven years old, his brother Daniel was born, who became his father’s favorite.

He did very well in school, although his teachers found him

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difficult to teach and other students constantly bullied him.

He was severely nearsighted and had to start wearing thickframed glasses at the age of five.

When Robert turned sixteen, his life went downhill fast.

First, his father died of a heart attack at age 39. Shortly afterwards, his mother remarried, which Robert rather resented and was angered by. He later claimed that around this same time he was sexually assaulted by a male coworker at the restaurant he worked at. A loner, he saw a 1965 adaption of the Robert Fowles book The Collector -about a man who abducts a young woman and holds her captive in his basement. It made a lasting impression upon him.

In 1967, at eighteen-years-of-age, Berdella enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute, initially dreaming of becoming a professor, but instead he pursues a career as a chef. During his time in art school, he engaged in animal torture at least three times -- during two of them he tortured a duck and a chicken and the third time he experimented with sedatives and tranquilizers on a dog.

As he began his culinary career, he was also beginning his criminal career. He abused alcohol and was selling drugs, and then at the age of nineteen he was arrested for possession of LSD and marijuana. He was released after a short five days due to lack of evidence.

In 1969, he dropped out of school and became a full-time chef. As a member of a local chefs’ association, he helped set up a training program for aspiring chefs. He was also a

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member of his local crime prevention and neighborhood watch association. When he was thirty-two, he quit working as a chef and opened up his own store, Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar, where he sold all kinds of oddities and antiques.

Having opened up about being gay, he had a brief relationship with a Vietnam veteran, but their relationship didn’t last long. Instead, he started hanging out with male prostitutes, befriending them and even trying to help them out of prostitution.

July of 1984 marks the time that Berdella is believed to have started killing. He drugged one of his prostitute friends, Jerry Howell, and started to keep him in his basement. He repeatedly tortured and raped him over a night’s time before fatally asphyxiating him.

In April of the next year, another friend of Berdella’s, Robert Sheldon, came to stay with him for a few days and found himself drugged and held captive in the basement just as Howell had been. At first, Berdella had a change of heart about “keeping” him and took him to a doctor to have his injuries treated. A short time passed until Sheldon found himself returned to Berdella’s basement once again. A workman came to do some work on Berdella’s home, “forcing” Berdella to fatally suffocate Sheldon so that he wouldn’t be heard.

A couple months later, Berdella found Mark Wallace, who had helped him do some yard work, hiding in his tool shed to seek shelter from a storm. His situation got a hundred times worse when Berdella invited him inside his house, drugged

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him, and held him captive. After hours of torture, he was killed the same way he killed his other victims.

In September, he picked up James Ferris at a gay bar, invited him home and took him captive. After weeks of torture, he was killed.

In June of 1986, Berdella lured a man named Todd Stoops -- a male prostitute that he had known for some time -- to his house and held him captive for six weeks before killing him as well. The upcoming year, he bailed Larry Pearson out of prison and starting holding him prisoner in his basement, killing him after six weeks. In March of 1988, he kidnapped his last known victim, a prostitute named Chris Bryson, and held him captive just as all of the others. While Berdella was at work, Bryson managed to break free from his restraints and escape by jumping from a second floor window. He ran to a neighbor’s house, wearing nothing besides from a dog collar around his neck, and called the police.

And so Berdella’s killings came to an end. His torture chamber was exposed along with the polaroids he snapped of his victims, his torture logs, and remains of his victims that were found on his property. Berdella ultimately made a deal to avoid the death penalty in exchange for a full confession.

Berdella only spent a short few years in prison before dying of a heart attack in 1992. Some time before his death, he claimed in a letter that the prison staff were withholding his heart medication.

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Andrei Chikatilo “The Butcher of Rostov”, “The Red Ripper”, “The Forest Strip Killer”, “The Rostov Ripper” 1936-1994 Birthplace: Yablochnoye, Ukrainian SSr, Soviet Union Ethnicity: Ukrainian Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Time at Large: 1978-1990 Method(s): Strangulation, Stabbing Perversion(s): Sadism, Cannibalism, Necrophilia, Mutilation Number of Victims: 53+ Type of Victims: Co-Ed, Mainly Very Young Hunting Grounds: Soviet Union Occupation at Large: Telephone Engineer, School Teacher, Supply Clerk Family Status at Large: Married, Two Children “What I did was not for sexual pleasure. Rather it brought me some peace of mind.”

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936, in Yablochnoye, a village in the heart of rural Ukraine in the USSR. During the 1930s, Ukraine was known as the “Breadbasket” of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s policies of agricultural collectivization caused a widespread hardship and famine that decimated the population as a whole. During

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the same time of Chikatilo’s birth, the effect of the famine was still widely felt, and his early childhood was greatly influenced by deprivation. The situation was made even more when the USSR entered World War II against Germany, bringing sustained bombing raids on Ukraine.

Adding to the external hardships, Chikatilo believed to have suffered from hydrocephalus (water on the brain) at birth, which caused genital-urinary tract problems for him later in life, including bedwetting into his late adolescence and, later, the inability to sustain an erection (although he was able to ejaculate). His home life was put on halt by his father’s conscription into the war against Germany, where he was captured, held prisoner, and then vilified by his countrymen for allowing himself to be captured, when he finally returned home. Afterwards, Chikatilo suffered the consequences of his father’s “cowardice”, by getting constantly picked on and bullied at school.

Painfully shy as a result from bullying, his only sexual experience during his adolescence occurred at age fifteen, when he overpowered a young girl, ejaculated immediately during the brief struggle, for which he received even more ridicule. This humiliation was the turning point for his view on sex and all future sexual experiences; cementing his association of sex with violence.

He failed his entrance exam to Moscow State University, and a spell of National Service was followed by a move to Rodionovo-Nesvetayevsky, a town near Rostov, in 1960, where he became a telephone engineer. His younger sister

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moved in with him and, concern by his lack of success with the opposite sex, engineered a meeting with a local girl, Fayina, whom he went on to marry in 1963. Despite all of his sexual problems and lack of interest in conventional sex, they produced two children, and lived an outwardly “normal” family life. Chikatilo changed career to become a schoolteacher in 1971. A string of complaints about indecent assaults upon young children forced him to move from one school to another, before he was finally settled at a mining school in Shakhty, near Rostov.

Over the following twelve years, Chikatilo committed over fifty know murders. For the fact that reports of crime, like serial murder and rape, were greatly suppressed by Soviet authorities in the state-controlled media, stories began taking a life of their own; among the rumors that circulated was that the victims were killed and mutilated by a werewolf.... They weren’t far off.

The murders weren’t published until August of 1984, by this time Chikatilo had killed at least thirty people. He was suspected of killing Yelena Zabotnova and had even been seen with her, but due to the fact that another man confessed to the murder under torture, he was executed instead. Chikatilo was able to continue killing.

In September of 1984, he was arrested after soliciting a prostitute, having been seen approaching a number of women at the Rostov bus station. His briefcase was searched and contained a kitchen knife, a towel, a rope, and a jar of petroleum jelly. Unfortunately, his blood type did not

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match that of the semen found on the bodies, forcing the investigators to release him. The fact that the semen did not match has never been fully explained and is believed to have been a clerical error. Other sources claim that it was because he was a non-secretor, meaning that his blood type wouldn’t be determinable from his semen. Weeks after his arrest, he was expelled from the Communist party after being convicted of stealing from his workplace and was sentenced to three months in jail.

In November of 1990, Chikatilo was stopped and questioned by police when he was coming out of the area in which his final victim, Svetlana Korostik, was found. The day after the remains were discovered, he was formally arrested and interrogated. Over the next two weeks, he confessed to an outstanding fifty-six murders, but the investigators had only attributed thirty-six to him.

The case went to trial in April of 1992. Chikatilo had been placed inside an iron cage when on the stand to protect him from the family members of his victims. His behavior during the proceedings was utterly bizarre; he pulled his pants down twice, exposed himself, and shouted that he was not a homosexual, he claimed that he was pregnant and lactating at some points and alternated between boredom and pure anger. He also denied being guilty of numerous murders to which he had already confessed to. When the prosecutor was about to deliver the final argument, Chikatilo broke into song and was removed from the courtroom.When he was brought back in and offered a moment to speak, he kept

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silent. Though the defense tried to claim he was insane, a group of court-appointed psychiatrist disagreed.

On October 14, 1992, Chikatilo was found guilty of 52 murders; 21 males and 31 females. On February 14, 1994, he was executed with a single shot to the head, and his last words were, “Don’t blow my brains out! The Japanese want to buy them!”

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WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT CLASSIFICATIONS? Chapter Five

Perversions The technical term for sexual perversions is paraphilia, which translates to “abnormal love”.

Serial killers have extraordinary dysfunctional sex lives, usually due to the fact that they are incapable of experiencing anything resembling true love. They can only get aroused when they have another human under their power completely, able to freely turn their darkest fantasies into reality.

Sadism “Sadistic Personality Disorder”- Amused by or takes

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pleasure in the psychological or physical suffering of others.

It is obvious to say that all serial killers fit this diagnosis.

“Sexual Sadism” - one of the major paraphilias - is a perversion of the erotic instinct in which the suffering of a victim is not just generally enjoyable but intensely arousing, often to the point of an orgasm. Not every serial killer suffers from sadism in the sexual sense but a large amount do.

Dominance Sadistic pleasure isn’t just about inflicting pain but also the assertion of power, the lust to dominate, to reduce a victim to a state of submission.

The vast majority of serial killers were victims to abuse during their childhood, made to feel utterly helpless and humiliated. Resulting, they grew up with a malevolent need to inflict the same pain upon others.

Fetishism A disorder in which a person, usually male, can only be aroused by an object associated with the opposite sex, generally either an intimate article of clothing - shoes, bras, panties, nylon stockings, etcetera - or a specific body part most commonly the feet.

The fetishist is so fixed on the object itself that the sex partner becomes secondary.

“The person with fetishism frequently masterbates while holding, rubbing, smelling the fetish object, or may ask his

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sexual partner to wear the object during sexual encounter.” American Psychiatric Association To the average human, no real harm comes from fetishism.

However, fetishes of psychopaths are unspeakably extreme and dangerous.

The average fingernail fetishist might be aroused by the sight of a woman with long, sharp, claw-like nails. For the psychopathic fingernail fetishist, on the other hand, their arousal may only come from eating the fingernail clippings of female corpses. The average foot fetishist might be aroused by the simple sight and touch of feet. For a psychopathic foot fetishist, their arousal is sparked by highly disturbing manners. For example, The fetishtic impulses of serial killers account for their tendency to take “trophies” from their murder victims. These items are essentially fetish object, providing them with intense, perverted pleasures which allows them to relive their crimes in fantasy.

Transvestism The practice of cross-dressing, which is wearing clothing traditionally associated with the opposite sex or gender.

There have been several cases of cross dressing among serial killers.

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Vampirism Fictionally speaking, “vampires” are commonly known to be from the realm of the undead - spending their days in coffins, only to awaken at night to feast on the living. Or in the modern times you might have the notion (via Twilight) that vampires sparkle in the sunlight and have appallingly flawless features. But in the realm of abnormal psychology, “vampirism” refers to a different and rather sickening perversion in which one derives intense sexual pleasure from the drinking of human blood.

Serial killers and criminal psychopaths alike with a predilection for drinking blood can be better described as blood-crazed maniacs who resort to the most hideous acts to satisfy their monstrous cravings.

Cannibalism Cannibalists derive intense erotic pleasure from eating their victims. Although cannibalism is relatively rare among serial killers, those who practice it are motivated by sexual impulses, as does any other perversion. Some overly disturbed cannibalists took their perversion to a whole new level, selling their victims meat and disguising it as “cow meat”; turning innocent people into unknowing cannibalists.

Necrophilia The suffix “-phile” is used to denote a person who is especially enamored of something. Therefore, necrophiles denotes lovers of the dead. Necrophiles become sexually

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aroused by the thought, sight, smell, and feel of corpses.

They often perform sexual acts upon their corpses.

Pedophilia Pedophiliac murders derive intense sadistic pleasure from raping and slaughtering people of a young age.

Gerontophilia Gerontophilia is the exact opposite of pedophilia. It is a morbid sexual fixation upon the elderly. They derive perverted pleasure from attacking and killing the old.

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WHY DO THEY DO IT? Chapter Six

To know the exact reason of why a person becomes a murderous monster can sometimes be taking a stab in the dark (pun-intended). For some serial killers, not even the greatest psychological genius could pinpoint the reasons behind their evildoings. With that being said, there are quite a few theories as to why serial killers do what they so terribly do.

Avatism Avatism means an ancient, ancestral trait that reappears in modern life.Serial killers who perform cannibalism, human sacrifice, and other barbaric practices are very likely to be atavists. They derive these barbaric practices from their

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earliest ancestors. An atavistic serial killer produces ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and inferior animals.

Brain Damage Severe head injuries are common in the early lives of serial killers. It is not to say that head trauma is solely the cause for one to become a serial killer, since many children suffer from head traumas and grow up without committing one murder, but brain damage can be seen as icing on the cake for one’s development into becoming a serial killer. Head injuries suffered by serial killers are often the direct result of childhood maltreatment, from their mother beating them in the head to the point of a coma or their father severely injuring them with a glass bottle to the head.

Child Abuse If a person is severely maltreated from their earliest years, being subject to constant psychological and physical abuse, it is likely to say that they will grow up with a malignant view of life. To that person, the world is a place of hatred, where all human relationships are based - not on love and respect but on power, suffering, and humiliation. Having been tortured by their caretakers, they will grow up seeking to inflict torture on others, partly from revenge and partly because they can only feel a sense of pleasure through inflicting pain on others. Nearly every serial killer suffered extreme mistreatment by their parents or guardians.

Scientific research has shown that a traumatic upbringing

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can actually alter the anatomy of a person’s brain. Brain scans of severely abused children have found that specific areas of the cortex never develop properly, leaving them incapable of feeling empathy for other human beings.

Mother Hatred Severe hatred of one’s mother causes them to grow up with a virulent hatred, not just of the maternal monster who raised them, but of womankind in general.

Multiple criminologists have claimed that serial killers who target women are driven largely by mother hate. The crimes of a psychopathic killer is invariably rooted in their unconscious need to take revenge upon their rejecting mother.

“If I could dig up my mother’s grave, I’d take out her ones and kill her again.” -Joe Fischer

Mean Genes Of course, heredity plays a huge role in a child’s character growing up. Linking with child abuse, the same genes that make some adults miserable excuses for parents consequently make their children warped and pernicious.

Experiments show that when people born with a certain “lowactive” gene (monoamine oxidase A gene) are subject to severe childhood maltreatment, they grow up to be criminally violent at a far higher rate than people born with a “highactive” gene.

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Adoption It would be mendacious to say that all of the millions of adopted children turn out to be serial killers -- but a high percentage of serial killers have been raised in adoptive families or foster homes which gives the child an unstable background and upbringing.

The usual belief that they have been rejected by their birth parents contributes to the sense of worthlessness and shame that typically afflicts budding psychopaths.

Fantasy In the depths of the unconscious mind, even the most morally upright person harbors fantasies of forbidden behavior, savage lust, and primal violence. The difference between the serial killer and the morally upright person is their willingness to make their darkest desires and fantasies reality. A morally upright person who has a dream of butchering their ex-girlfriend will see it as a nightmare and feel a great amount of guilt. On the contrast, a serial killer will cultivate and wallow in that dream until it has reached an unbearable pitch of intensity to the point where the try and turn that dream into reality.The twisted fantasies of serial killers begin at a young age.

As psychopaths reach puberty, their fantasies become increasingly sexual and more alarmingly aberrant.

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Profit Some commit their crimes, not only for pleasure, but for monetary gain.

Celebrity Most serial killers are nonentities, nobodies who have failed in every important aspect of life. Having been subject, nearly always, to brutal upbringings, they are instilled with a sense of utter worthlessness. Seeing their names in the papers of their faces on the television fills their hollow souls with an intoxicating sense of power and importance. Murder is their only sense of making a “mark” on the world.

“He was a nobody who became somebody by killing people.”

-Pete Hamill (about David Berkowitz) Media notoriety is an important benefit for many serial killers, another sick gratification they derive from their crimes.

“I wanted to get known, to get myself a name. I knew I had to kill a lot of people to get my name in the newspapers all over the world.” -Robert Smith

The Devil Made Me Do It Some serial killers insist that they were victims of demonic possession.

“A demon has been living inside me since birth.” -David Berkowitz

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HOW DO THEY DO IT? Chapter Seven

Triggers The triggering factor is often times a specific type of victim, one who has the kind of qualities that turn the killer on.

Hunting Grounds Generally speaking, serial killers commit their atrocities within a particular area -- whether that area is a neighborhood, a city, or a county -- the killer sticks to a distinct territory.

Targets of Opportunity Similar to being struck by lightning or winning the lottery, the odds are very slim to die at the hands of a serial killer. That being said, some people run a much greater risk than others -- prostitutes, street hustlers, teenage runaways, vagrants,

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junkies, and other social outcasts. These people are called “targets of opportunity”, for the reason being that these people are especially vulnerable to serial homicide because they are easy to snare and overpower and they are so marginalized that no one, including the police and press, pays much attention when they go missing. The majority have no family or close friends to report when they’ve gone missing.

Oddly, the term “target of opportunity” takes on a whole new meaning as well. Victims who are randomly slain by a serial killer because they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some killers have a preference for their victims while others will murder any easy target that they cross paths with.

Snare Also known as a “blitz attack”, the method by which a serial killer snares his victims vary according to his particular pathological needs. An example is ambushing an unwary pedestrian, blasting away at a couple in a parked car, following a lady to her apartment and shattering her skull while she fiddles with her keys, or slashing a prostitutes neck from behind.

Wanted Ads As most people know, personal ads are most always mendacious. Those “British models in their mid-twenties” are most likely “overweight middle-aged men”. The usual

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outcome is just an awkward, disappointing date... But there have been some outcomes with far worse results. One way that serial killers find their prey is through placing such ads.

Others find their prey by answering them.

Signature, Ritual, M.O. Some serial killers have a “signature” to their crimes to identify themselves as the killer for multiple murder sites.

Although this is more likely to be found in a Hollywood thriller than real life, there has been some notorious serial killers with a “signature”. The Zodiac signed his letters with a distinctive crossed circle mark. The Boston Strangler identified his grotesque killings through tying his lethal ligatures into ironically cheerful birthday-ribbon bows.

Richard Ramirez used lipstick to draw satanic pentagrams on the bodies of his victims. Several of Gary Ridgway's victims were found with weird, pyramid-shaped stones inserted into their vaginas. Charles Manson’s followers often inscribed “pig” and other hateful comments in their victims blood around the crime scene.

Generally speaking, the “signature” is used only by those psycho-killers who derive intense gratification from taunting the police and creating as much media publicity as possible.

But the majority of serial killers behave oppositely and have no interest in drawing attention to their crimes for the main reason that they wanted to be left alone to pursue their atrocities in secret. These killers generally do everything

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possible to keep the world from knowing the horrendous crimes they’re committing.

There is another meaning of the term “signature” used by criminologists which refers to a feature of the murder that reflects some deep-seated psychological quirk. The killer is driven to commit specific acts of violence or desecration on the victim’s body. These distinctive actions constitute the serial killer’s unique “signature”.

MO (Modus Operandi) refers to the killer’s preferred method of committing his crimes: how he selects, snares, subdues, and dispatches his victims, then makes his getaway. It is not always simple to distinguish between a killer’s MO and his “signature” since there is a ritualistic quality to “signatures” -a compulsion to continually perform it in fulfillment of some twisted psychosexual need -- criminologists sometimes use the term “ritual” and “signature” interchangeably.

A signature act is something the killer needs to satisfy his sickest needs and urges. Whereas, the MO relates to the purely practical aspects of pulling off and getting away with the crime.

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Methods Many experts have come up with categories for certain serial killers throughout history. Crime historian, Philip Jenkins, proposes two major categories of serial killers: the predictable type (criminals with a long history of brutal fantasy and behaviors whose progression to serial murders seems nearly unsurprising) versus the respectable types (petty felons with no prior history of violent crimes whose sudden turn to serial murder is unexpected). Forensic psychiatrist, Park Dietz, identifies three major kinds of serial murder: psychopaths who kill for sadistic, sexual pleasure, psychotics who act under the influence of hallucinations, and custodial killers like doctors, nurses, and other caretakers who usually poison or smother their victims. R.M. Holmes and J. DeBurger divide serial killers into four varieties, based on their underlying motivations: visionary types (psychotics who hear voices or see visions commanding them to kill); mission-oriented types (generally prostitute killers who believe they are on a crusade to rid the world of scum); hedonistic types (lust-killers who murder for perverted pleasure); and control-oriented types (who derive their sick gratification less from sex than from the assertion of power and dominance over the victim). And there is another method to categorize serial killers -- by their preferred method of kill. Their method is shown by how they kill -- the weapon they use, the kinds of injuries they enjoy inflicting -reveals a great amount about their psychology with their twisted needs and fantasies.

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There are some killers who do not limit themselves to any one type of weapon or method of killing. According to FBI’s classification system, “disorganized” killers -- whose crimes are often committed in a frenzied, spontaneous outbreak -will dispatch their victims with whatever weapons readily available. Then, other killers have been known to possess multiple killing methods. But for the most part, serial killers stick to a certain preference of killing.

Rippers Known as the most gruesome of all homicides are those perpetrated by rippers. Richard von Krafft-Ebing classifies a murder to be the method of a ripper “when the body has been opened and parts (intestines, genitals) torn out.” The modern designation for such killings derives from the legendary monster of Whitechapel. The grotesque butcheries that “Jack the Ripper” perpetrated on twenty-fiveyear-old prostitute, Mary Kelly, represents a perfectly disturbing “ripper” killing. As an 1888 newspaper reported: “The throat had been cut right across with a knife, nearly severing the head from the body. The abdomen had been partially ripped open, and both of the breasts had been cut from the body... The nose had been cut off, the forehead skinned, and the things, down to the feet, stripped of flesh...

The entrails and other portions of the frame were missing, but the liver, etc., were found placed between the feet of this poor victim. The flesh from the thighs and legs, together with the breasts and nose, had been placed by the murderer on

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the table, and one of the hands of the dead woman had been pushed into her stomach.�

Stranglers Stranglers receive their sadistic satisfaction from the act of strangulation in itself. Some of these stranglers become so aroused while throttling a victim that they reach a sexual climax during the murder. The specific method of strangling varies between stranglers. Some prefer choking their victims with their bare hands, others enjoy ropes and cords, and some enjoy articles belonging to their victim -- scarves, bathrobe sashes, nylon stockings, etc.

Ax Murderers Back in the 19th century -- when many Americans still lived on farms, butchered their own chickens, and chopped their own wood to heat their homes -- hatchets and axes were staples of the household. Which explains why when someone spontaneously went on a bloodthirsty rampage -they often grabbed one of these readily available chopping implements to complete the job. WHen pawing through a newspaper from the 1800s, you are likely to find a case involving a gruesome ax murder. Discluding slasher movies which routinely portray psycho-killers as ax-wielding maniacs, axes are rarely the weapon of choice for serial killers, being hard to conceal and awkward to wield, especially indoors.

Cases of ax murders are often from a single murder or multiple murder killer, but not usually from a serial killer.

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Poisoners Poisoners often subject the people closest to them -- friends, family members, and coworkers -- to excruciatingly slow and painful deaths, and derive a considerable amount of pleasure from observing the torments of their victims.

Generally speaking, poison is preferred by women and caretakers (nurses, doctors, etc.). During the Victorian era, arsenic was a popular, over-the-counter item, sold in various forms and used as everything from a pesticide to a cosmetic.

However, when mixed into someone’s food, the results were detrimental.

In most cases of arsenic ingestion, symptoms show within the hour. The first sign is an acrid sensation in the throat.

Then nausea sets in, growing more unbearable by the minute. Shortly after, vomiting begins. That continues long after the stomach is empty, to the point where the victim is heaving up a foul, whitish fluid streaked with blood. The mouth is parched, the tongue is thickly coated, and the throat is constricted. The victim is seized with a terrible thirst.

Anything drank, however, only makes the vomiting worse.

Uncontrollable diarrhea -- often bloody and invariably accompanied by raking pain -- follows the vomiting. Some victims experience violent burning from mouth to anus. Urine becomes scanty and red in color. As the hours pass, the victim’s face -- deathly pale to begin with -- takes on a bluish tint. The eyes grow hollow. The skin is slick with perspiration

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that gives off an unusually thick, fetid odor. The victim’s breathing becomes harsh and irregular, extremities cold, heartbeat feeble. There is a chance of convulsions of the limbs and excruciating cramps in the muscles of the legs.

Depending upon the amount of poison consumed, this torment may last anywhere from five hours to several days.

Death, when it finally comes, is a mercy.

Shooters Although serial killers are regularly thought of as madmen running around and bludgeoning their victims with a hammer or meat-cleaver -- there still have been a number of notorious serial killers who preferred to commit their atrocities with firearms. Shooting -- even at a long distance -can supply the kinds of sick thrills that psychopaths crave, including sexual gratification. Even for those serial shooters who do not derive sexual gratification from their crimes, guns can satisfy their psychopathic urges by giving them a godlike sense of power.

Taunts Although much satisfaction may be derived from outwitting the police, most serial killers have no desire to draw undue attention to themselves. WIth that being said, there are still numerous amounts of notorious serial killers who took delight in thumbing their noses at authorities.

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The most famous of the written taunts received by the police during the height of the Whitechapel horrors has had great suspicion as to whether it was written by the true killer or not.

Inscribed in red ink, it reads: 25 Sept: 1888 Dear Boss I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal.

How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last jo to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha.

The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to go to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.

Yours truly Jack the Ripper

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Although this letter was most likely a hoax, a few weeks later a letter was received that is generally regarded as the only authentic communication sent by the Whitechapel murderer.

On October 16th, 1888 -- two weeks after the Ripper savaged a streetwalker named Catherine Eddowes and removed her left kidney -- a parcel arrived at the home of George Lusk, a man who had organized to assist in the hunt for the killer. Inside the package was a rotting chunk of human kidney and a jeering letter addressed to Lusk.

Sor I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloddy knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer signed Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk Letters, like those from the Whitechapel murders, has been carried on by multiple other serial killers. In April, 1977, police investigating the latest double murder committed by the phantom shooter terrorizing New York City found a letter that would provide this notorious killer with his homicidal nickname. The letter was addressed to Captain Joseph

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Borrelli, a key member of the police task force established to track down the shadowy gunman.

Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli, I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the “Son of Sam.” I am a little brat.

When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood.

“Go out and kill,” commands father Sam. Behind our house some rest. Mostly young -raped and slaughtered -- their blood drained -just bones now.

Papa Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can’t get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by.

I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength then everybody else -- programmed to kill.

However, to stop me you must kill me. Attention all police: Shoot me first -- shoot to kill or else keep out of my way or you will die!

Papa Sam is old now. He needs some blood to

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preserve his youth. He has had too many heart attacks. “Ugh, me hoot, it hurts, sonny boy.”

I miss my pretty princess most of all. She’s resting in our ladies house. But I’ll see her soon.

I am the “Monster” -- “Beelzebub” -- the chubby behemouth.

I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game -- tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are prettyist of all. It must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt -- my life. Blood for papa.

Mr. Borrelli, sir, I don’t want to kill anymore. No sur, no more but I must, “honour thy father.”

I want to make love to the world. I love people. I don’t belong on earth. Return me to yahoos.

To the people of Queens, I love you. And I want to wish all of you a happy Easter. May God bless you in this life and in the next. And for now I say goodbye and goodnight.

POLICE: Let me haunt you with these words: I’ll be back! I’ll be back!

To be interrpreted as -- bang, bang, bang, bang - ugh!!

Yours in murder Mr. Monster

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Escalation There are different explanations for this phenomenon.

Sometimes this sort of unbridled escalation is a symptom of the killer’s spiraling mental disintegration, the utter breakdown of his impulse control. At other times, it springs from his megalomaniacal belief that he is invulnerable, that he can get away with murder as often as he likes. In rare instances, such growing recklessness may even reflect the killer’s unconscious desire to get caught.

For homicidal psychopaths, lust-killing often becomes an addiction. Like heroin addicts, they not only become dependent on the thrilling sensation -- the rush -- of torture, rape, and murder; they come to require even greater and more frequent fixes. This kind of escalation can easily lead to the killer’s own destruction. THeir urgent quest to satisfy their cravings, serial killers are often undone by their increasingly unbridled sadism, which derives them to such reckless extremes that they are finally caught.

“Monsters tend to be sadists, deriving sexual gratification from imposing pain on others. Their secret perversions, at first sporadic, often trap them in a pattern as the intervals between indulgences become briefer: it is a pattern whose repetitions develop into an hysterical crescendo, as if from one outrage to another the

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monster were seeking as a climax his own annihilation.�

-John Brophy, The Meaning of Murder

Torture Sadistic sexual pleasure from inflicting unbearable agony on their helpless victims, indulging in deliberate, protracted torture is derived from serial killers who perform torture upon their victim.

Pat Brown, as written in her book Killing for Sport: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, describes the typical serial torturekiller: While a “normal� serial killer might brutally beat, rape, strangle, and shove a tree limb into his victim, this is not the same type of behavior exhibited by the sexually sadistic serial killer.

The latter keeps his victim alive for hours or days while he tortures her with all variety of sexually sadistic acts. He likes to see her pain, hear her screams, and make her beg and plead. He may have all manner of implements in his rape kit to accomplish the level of torture he wishes to achieve: whips, nipple clamps, X-Acto blades, dildos, hot wax, enemas, garrotes, gags, and various bondage material.

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Trophies The common tendency among serial killers -- keeping mementos of their crimes. According to the FBI, there are two categories of serial killer keepsakes: the “souvenir” and the “trophy”, which are both used interchangeably. Souvenirs remind the killer of how much fun he had and allows him to relive the experience in fantasy until he can do it again.

Trophies are analogous to the mounted moose head or stag antlers that a hunter might proudly display over their fireplace -- prideful evidence of the killer’s lethal skills.

Occasionally, these items are converted to cash by the killer -- selling an expensive watch, a wedding ring, a gold necklace, etc. However, generally the things most cherished by serial killers have little to absolutely no inherent value.

As intrinsically worthless, these macabre souvenirs possess an almost magical power for the killer, who clearly runs a great risk by holding on to such incriminating evidence.

Serial killers derive such profound, perverted pleasure from their creepy treasures that they cannot give them up -- in many cases, trophies are a masturbatory turn-on.

Sometimes, instead of souvenirs, the killer might shoot a picture of his atrocities or document them in some other form.

Disposal What a serial killer does with the remains of his victim is as much a part of his MO as his method of killing. For some psychos, ridding of the corpse is the high point of the crime.

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With that being said, most serial killers find body disposal purely a practical concern -- a problem needing solving.

Other serial killers have stored the rotting remains of their victims right on their premises.

Serial killers who commit their atrocities at home (or in a secret location designed for that purpose) can generally take their time to dispose of their victims in a carefully planned and organized manner. Obviously, the case is different for serial killer who do their killings outside of the house. How such psychos dispose of their victim depends on various factors, some calculated, others having to do with the warped psychology of the killer. Some serial killers might snatch a victim, drive her to a secluded spot, then rape her, kill her, and make a quick get away, leaving the corpse exposed to the elements or possibly concealed in a shallow, hastily dug grave with a pile of dead leaves scooped over it.

In other cases, a psycho-killer who has, say, murdered a hitchhiker or snatched a victim from a shopping mall parking lot, might dump the body along the roadside, or at an abandoned industrial area, or into a ravine. Depending on how “organized� he is, the killer may devote a fair amount of time to checking out the potential dumping sites in advance before selecting the one that seems to offer the best opportunities for disposal.

By contrast, other serial killers deliberately leave their victims’ corpses in conspicuous places -- a decision that generally

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has as much to do with their perverted need to taunt the police and terrorize the public as with anything else. Another, rather opposite, manner is going to great lengths to obliterate every trace of their victims’ existence. For example, by incinerating, cremating, etc. the remains.

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HOW DOES IT END? Chapter Eight

Even the most fiendishly cunning serial killer cannot elude the forces of law and order forever. Heroic profilers create uncannily accurate psychological portraits of their quarry that lead straight to the killer’s lair. Crime scene investigators employ a dazzling array of high-tech tools to identify a perpetrator from the merest, microscopic traces of evidence.

FBI field agents defeat their diabolical foes by solving elaborate puzzles that would match the deductive genius of Sherlock Holmes.

These fiction-based shows and stories, however, show a not-so-realistic depiction of a true crime case. In reality, stopping killers is a grueling and distinctly unglamorous

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business, owing more to sheer accident, dumb luck, criminal incompetence, and old-fashioned dogged detective work than to those of a forensic razzle-dazzle that makes for an exciting movie or suspense novel. And, unfortunately, in real life the bad guy sometime gets away with murder.

Profiling Profiling, of course, does not magically provide the specific identity of the killer. It rather indicates the kind of individual most likely to have committed a crime. It is a tool for narrowing down the field of suspects, for helping police focus on certain avenues of investigation -- profiling has often proved useful. The FBI’s criminal profiling program has been around for over thirty years. They have a high-tech system known as the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) which is a computerized database that collects, collates, and analyzes information on solved and unsolved serial homicides across the nation.

For all of the advancements made in this field, however, criminal profiling still remains essentially what it has always been: a painstaking procedure of deducing certain facts about an elusive, unknown killer, based upon statistical probabilities, years of investigative experience, psychological training, plus a healthy dose of intuition and educated guesswork.

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Capture Since serial killers derive such intense satisfaction from their enormities, they generallly try everything in their power to escape detection and capture. This presents them as significant challenges to the police. Although it is easy to overestimate the intelligence level of serial killers, most of them do possess a sinister cunning that allows them to elude the police from their identity, often for a considerable amount of time.

Some limit themselves to “low-priority” victims to beseech capture. Serial killers detect that if a few “undesirables” vanish from the streets, the police will shrug off the matter, assuming that their means of disappearance was from one of many probable causes. Other serial killers tend to stay on the move, committing their atrocities in different jurisdictions so that the police do not realize that the various murders are linked.

While, of course, there have been instances where masterful police work or brilliant psychological deduction or sophisticated scientific analysis has led to the capture of serial killers, many cases are resolved as a result of factors.

In a study of thirty-six serial killers by John Douglas, police investigation had played a key role in half of the cases, but other killers had been betrayed by accomplices or identified or had turned themselves in. Some serial killers end up

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being caught because they start to feel invulnerable and grow increasingly careless.

Suicide Although suicide is relatively rare among serial killers, some serial killers reach a point where they can no longer stand the unremitting horror their lives have become. They may begin to behave in such self-destructive ways that they are certain to get caught. For the most part, serial killers only commit suicide when -- realizing that the jig is up -- choose a quick death at their own hands (or those of the police) over public disgrace and imprisonment.

Punishment A fair number of serial killers have been executed, especially in the past. For all the denunciations of capital punishment as a barbaric relic of the past, modern methods of execution are positively humane compared to those of the premodern era.

It is most certain that all serial killers will receive life in prison without parole or sentenced to die.

Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity Commonly, a person who butchers innocent people and rapes their dead bodies would be seen by the public to be insane -- but referring to the law, that is rarely the case.

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The legal definition of insanity -- based upon a one-hundredand-sixty-year-old precedent known as the M’Naghten Rule - is defined as the inability to distinguish right from wrong. It is hard to argue that most serial killers meet the legal criteria for insanity since the majority of serial killers are psychopaths -- meaning that they devoid of moral faculties, behave in rational, often highly calculating ways. The fact that most serial killers go to such lengths to elude capture suggests that they know they’re engaged in wrongdoing.

Many people suspect that the insanity defence is a ruse employed by clever lawyers in collaboration with naive psychiatrists to win an acquittal of an obviously guilty client.

But even the judges can be hard to convince. Even if serial killers have been found mentally incompetent and committed to asylums, the rest of their days are (usually) spent in mental institutions.

For the most part, winning an acquittal with an insanity plea is so difficult that few lawyers even attempt it. Perhaps the most popular ploy has been the “multiple personality” gambit, which has been attempted -- with a stunning lack of success -- by a number of infamous serial killers.

Unsolved A surprising amount of unsolved serial homicides never make national headlines. Many are barely noted in the communities where they have taken place. Mainly for the

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fact that many unsolved murders were involving socially despising victims whose death is greatly overlooked.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schechter, Harold. The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers. New York: Ballantine, 2004. Print.

Newton, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. New York: Checkmark, 1999. Print.

"Serial Killers." Carpe Noctem. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.carpenoctem.tv/serial-killers/>.

"Crime Rack." Crime Rack. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.crimerack.com/>.

"Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers." Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://murderpedia.org/>.

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"TruTV.com: Not Reality. Actuality." TruTV.com: Not Reality.

Actuality. N.p., 14 Mar. 2013. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.trutv.com/>.

Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.biography.com/>.

"Compulsion to Kill: A History of Serial Murder." - Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://psychautopsy.weebly.com/>.

"Biography." On Bio. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biographies>.

"Serial Killer Magazine." Serial Killer Magazine. N.p., n.d.

Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://www.serialkillercalendar.com/>.

"Crime / Punishment." About.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2013. <http://crime.about.com/>.

"Criminal Minds." Criminal Minds. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://criminalminds.wikia.com/wiki/Criminal_Minds_Wiki>.

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Killers have a dead conscience.

“NoSerial Morals, No Scruples, No Conscience. ” - R i c h a r d “ N i g h t S ta l k e r ” R A M I R E Z

Without a Conscience by Elizabeth Fraley divulges into the psychology behind serial killers. These real-life monsters have terrorized, tortured, and terminated civilizations for ages, which may not only make your bones chill but your interests flourish. With vigorous, up-to-date research and factual information, you just might become the next master on the psychology behind serial killers.

What does it all mean? Who are they? What is the history?

Who are the infamous serial killers? What are the different classifications?

Why do they do it? How do they do it? How does it end?

Yo u k n o w t h a t y o u w a n t t o k n o w t h e a n s w e r t o t h e s e q u e s t i o n s . . . so go ahead, read.

NAME: Elizabeth Fraley WHO: Author of “Without a Conscience” BORN: 1995 GENDER: Female B I R T H P L A C E : R e n t o n , Wa s h i n g t o n C O N TA C T: e . f r a l e y @ h o t m a i l . c o m

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